#agentbompton

It was dark, and there was water, and he just didn't know. Breaths came to him in short and panicked gasps, the reality of drowning eclipsing his fears of everything else for a moment. In the darkness, alone, with no one to hear him but the other damaged souls, John Facchino opened his mouth and screamed. The filing cabinets came apart at the joints, files scattered, and the furniture in his crushed office was reduced to their component parts.

And the door, when he looked at it, ceased to exist, the metals reduced to their elemental state in a heap of dust. There was light out there, and Sub-Director John Facchino of SHIELD crawled for it like a crazed animal, huddling near the broken body of the intern and the fire burning merrily in the remains of the copy machine.

He needed to find the others, assess the situation, get orders. Deputy Director Hill was on bridge duty; she'd know what to do. He put the fire out before he left, and made his way cautiously through the wreckage, navigating more by scent than sight.

It took him the better part of an hour, and he might have had to ease a few souls that couldn't be helped otherwise along their way. He was leading a group of five walking wounded when he kicked the door that led to the bridge in, aided by the dissolving of the hinges into base metals. He was getting the hang of that, but he felt more like passing out each time.

He swept his eyes over the unfamiliar pair running a search and rescue op, and growled. He was tired, sore, scared, and didn't know what the hell was going on. The feral in him was not playing well with others.

"Who are you, who sent you, and where are Director Fury and Deputy Director Hill?"

The two people standing in the bridge, one a large burly man in heavy armor with bright red hair was pulling up a piece of debris. The other was checking a fallen Agent who was alive but had a piece of shrapnel through her shoulder. The second, a young woman spun and drew her side arm, aiming it at the group.

The man dropped the chunk down, supporting it on his knee and held out a hand. “Oy! Wait lass, look at the Uniform. They’re SHIELD.” The woman looked over at him, then back to Facchino and nodded, holstering her side arm. The man straining again against the debris pulled it aside and let it drop. “We be your rescue crew lad.” He shook his head slowly however, “We dunna know where your Director be but…” He nodded over towards a body covered in a black tarp near the center of the bridge. “Yer Deputy Director I’m afraid is no longer with us.”

He could smell it, but he had to see. It couldn't be. Behind him one of the more impressionable of the rescued crew at least had the decency to throw up away from those needing rescued.

John crossed to the tarp, and though he could have moved it out of the way without so much as a blink, he knelt and pulled it back from her face. The angle of her head, no pulse... the baby would have had a longer time of it, and a slow and painful death it would have been. There was no life within, neither of them.

Someone would pay dearly for that.

"I am Sub-Director John Facchino, Human Resources.  Have any other senior agents been located?"

The man nodded, “Aye.” Kneeling down he checked the pulse of the agent that had been under the rubble and sighed. Nothing. “Know the name Zingari?”

Facchino shot a horrified look at Maria's corpse and swallowed hard. "Please tell me, oh God, please, that you didn't let him wander off after telling him the Deputy Director was dead?"

He shook his head, “No, he came to us. ‘S why where here. Last report I got he was about thirty miles west of here, beating the living tar out of the woman who killed that poor lass right there.” He pulled a bottle of water off his belt and approached the agent who’d blown chunks. “That was about forty five minutes ago.”

"Shit."

The unnatural swearing, torn from the lips of one of SHIELD's more uptight members, had agents pausing everywhere, looking at him in shock. "He was the father." He said simply.

There was little to no hope of catching Zingari now. There was too much to be done, and Facchino was the highest-ranked and thus had to do it. "Who are you from, anyway?"

“We’re DEM Corporation. Problem solvers. You lot tend to call us Mercenaries.” The younger woman moved over to the Deputy Director’s body and re-covered her. “We got special orders to make sure her remains are cared for so she can be buried. Beyond that we…” The man paused, and put a hand up behind his left ear, eyes defocusing for several moments. “Well, Zingari has been a busy boy."

"Update?" He moved to a heavy desk resting against a bulk head and moved it aside with minimum effort, kneeling to check for a pulse. Thready, but present. He motioned one of his men over to care for the agent, who he vaguely remembered had a mild addiction to Galaga. "And at the moment, I wouldn't care if you were Hydra as long as you were helping."

“Aye we’re getting a report now.” He waited a few moments before his eyes refocused and he put his hand down. “Well Bitch who did this is dead, Zingari apparently blew her to high hell. Brass, our brass is heading to a rendezvous point, and we got another team heading this way to help with the evacuation. Job’s simple. We get you out, we regroup, and then we hit the bastards who did this to ya.”

"Who did this?" He looked around the ruined room, glass and metal everywhere, and his eyes hardened. "Because it sure as hell wasn't one woman." He should call his family. He should call Kri- oh God. "Are there other teams, working in here?"

The man nodded, “Aye, we got about 8 people here, divided in teams of two. We couldn’t dedicate all of us here. But now that the initial threat seems to be waylaid we’re moving as quick as we can. And we’re deploying members of our teams from other parts of the world too. As for who did this,” to his credit, he didn’t shrug. “We don’t know yet. Zingari apparently got the woman who did some of this’ files, our top hacker is currently all over it.”

"I need to know... science labs, have they been cleared yet? Any survivors?"

“Lad I don’t know where the Science Labs are, so I couldn’t tell ya.”

Torn between wanting to find Kristi, but knowing her mutation would save her, John Facchino did what he knew best; his job.

"In the absence of any other Sub-directors, I'm taking charge of SHIELD. Can you patch me through to Zingari? He's the next-highest rank I know is alive."

“I’m afraid we carry our Comm’s in us lad, not on us. Unless you got something with I can adjust the frequency on I’m afraid I canna do it. And if you do I’m gonna have to listen in, just how our Tech works.”

"Tell him I'm alive, and I'd appreciate it if he at least waited for backup. It's more a friendly request, and if he feels he can't wait, to at least make sure they suffer for a few seconds"

One of the agents gaped at him, and decided not to say anything.

"I need the dogtags off the bodies, so I can figure out who's unaccounted for and who's alive."

He had far to many in his belt pouches as it was.

The man pulled a pouch off his belt and handed it over, it was heavy with the tags he’d already taken. In the meantime his other hand was up by his ear again. “Zingari is currently unconscious in a car being driven towards a rendezvous. Bastard fell asleep.”

Facchino nodded and took the bag, adding it to his belt. I have the full SHIELD roster on me, undamaged. I always do." He cast another glance over at the shrouded body of his superior, and for a moment there was an emotion more akin to grief that fluttered across his face.

"If he can, let him. He deserves a moment of peace, God knows he'll allow himself none when he wakes."

“Can only imagine what he’s goin’ through. Most of us in this job don’t go for families cause of this.” He looked down at the body and sighed to. “Man’s somethin’ though. Never seen the entire Corp volunteer for a job. Not like this. Ya dun fuck with family.”

“Wait... what? "You know him? From before SHIELD?"

“No use in keepin it secret I guess. He worked with us, before he left to work for you.”

"I know they allowed a fair amount of vagueness in his file, and some outright lies, so I never knew much about him before-hand. It makes sense, I suppose."

“Vagueness and lack of information is how we make a living.” He unfocused again, and there was a sound of engines outside. “Second teams here, and they brought air transport. We need to get the survivors we have out of here. Then we can sweep what we haven’t, we got orders to clear as much equipment as we can to, cause much as it might hurt for you to hear lad, not much of SHIELD at the moment, and we can make use of it.”

He nodded. "Consider it payment for services rendered. There's some things I can't let you have, but they mostly would have self-destructed anyway. If they say "Stark" on them, that's not ours and you’ll have to give it back to Stark Industries. Dr. Stark can be litigious

“Mr. Stark is dead.”

That was a punch to the gut. "W-What?"

"That's not... I mean... What about the rest of the Avengers?"

The man sighed, “You were not the only people hit, more than the Helicarrier fell. The North East is in chaos. There are riots, some because Mutants have found themselves without their powers, others because… people panic when their heroes die.” He crossed his arms. “Tony Stark’s body was found impaled on his tower, the head of a man identified as Dr. Bruce Banner was found beside him. And there are reports of a hammer that nobody can move, in a crater in midtown. As far as we know, the Avengers are dead.”

"Holy Mary, Mother of God." He should have been a priest. He'd wanted to be a priest. But now... "Fine. Take what you find, any questions on how it works, please do contact me. SHIELD AGENTS!" He raised his voice to be heard by the all too few in the room. "Those of you who don't need hospitalization, and you will not be making that determination for yourselves, will come with me. We're going to go keep the peace, if we have to arrest everyone between here and the Atlantic Ocean to do it."

He did not look again at the body, though his thoughts were on it. "We have suffered heavy losses today, we have all lost someone. We're not letting them die in vain. We swore an oath to serve and protect, and we will damn well do it."

He looked around at the frightened and angry faces, and nodded almost to himself.

"There's rioting, and New York will be worst off, so we head there. We will pick up any SHIELD agents we can find alive and well, hospitalize the ones who can be helped. We will recruit and deputize police forces and military. We have UN authorization to do so under Section 45, subsection E, paragraph 32. It's important, so memorize at least the location in the charter. Let's go save the world."

He nodded to the mercenaries and said softly "I'm leaving you be; I appreciate your work and efforts here. Stay in touch somehow?"

“I’d highly recommend against such actions lad.” He waved his hand around the room. “Your command structures gone, while your network was up, and we had access to it, we saw the ID tags of nearly two hundred agents go offline. Someone is going after you and going after you hard, and marchin’ straight into one of the most densely populated areas in the world isn’t going to help ya at all, ‘specially if what my boss says Zingari is suggestin’ is true.”

Facchino paled even more if possible. Two hundred... "Guess my arguments against tagging agents was valid, after all."  He wanted desperately to crawl back into a hole and never come back out, but SHIELD needed him.  "What about the Council? Any word from them or the UN?" There was a moment, and then he ran the conversation back through his head. "Wait, what was Agent Zingari suggesting?"

“We’re a paramilitary organization lad, not a rightful one, and we keep quiet about ourselves. We don’t know anything about the UN’s response to this, or any Council. Hell for all we know they got hit too, public communications are spotty, we got our own network that’s walled off but, we ain’t got no way of knowin’. As for Zingari’s thoughts…” With no real explanation he pulled a knife out of his belt, and nicked his cheek, his associate doing the same. “Red blood, as you can see, not blue.”

His eyes narrowed, and a low growl was barely heard. "Skrulls. He thinks Skrulls did this. They tried it before, and we stopped them."

“Aye,” He nodded and flipped the knife over, holding it out to Facchino, his other hand very clearly on the grip of his holstered revolver. “So, I’m going to have to ask that everyone prove in some shape or form they’re not a shape shiftin’ alien. Then we can get you outside, cause there are a couple hundred dazed and confused agent’s out there who have no leader, and only a handful of us trying to convince em to board our transports to safety.”