Start to run
At first Sharon thought she was being played, that this was a prank (and one in poor taste). Newbies don't get to head up task forces, that just didn't happen. And yet. Like so many other SHIELD agents she had gone over to other agencies: the FBI, CIA, Interpol - you name it. Sharon had a few contacts in the CIA, who vouched for her and paved her way into the agency. She had expected to be confined to a life of low-level administrative drudgery for at least a year, instead her new boss had reacted to the HYDRA debacle by creating a special task force to deal with any upcoming revelations about organizations, or people, who turned out to be HYDRA. And then she'd put Sharon in charge of it. Well, not all of it, but a good chunk. So, for the past two months Sharon and her team had scoured the leaked files for intel, driven out to now abandoned bases... And occasionally, local law enforcement found an unexpected treasure trove.
It was windy in Indiana when she arrived, not quite sure what was waiting for her there. The strange death of a local doctor that looked like a suicide but was too odd to be just that, a break-in at that doctor's private fertility clinic that had revealed more than anybody expected underneath the surface.
"Brief me." Sharon said to her colleague Kelly, a former SHIELD forensic scientist who'd come over to the CIA with her and whom she'd sent ahead as soon as the call from the Shelbyville Sheriff's department came through. Kelly looked pale with a tinge of green as she reported what the search of the premises had revealed, pointing out secret passageways and labs as they passed them. There was a faint antiseptic smell above a subtler note that was sickly-sweet and rotten.
"Any idea who might have called this in?" Sharon asked, stalling deliberately before stepping closer to the boxes on the wall. In the floodlights that had been set up she could just about make out the tiny silhouettes in them.
"Male voice, hard to tell the age. He was obviously trying very hard to make himself sound unrecognizable. No fingerprints or other traces at the phone either, not that we could tell anyway. It's a public phone, so..."
"Anything else? Accents? A lisp maybe?" Sharon inquired further, turning her back to the eerie sight for a moment to collect herself.
"The responder didn't notice anything. In any case, Adam's already on the recording. Hopefully we'll know more when he's done."
"Very good. Tell him to gather what security camera footage he can from the vicinity. If there's any chance our mystery caller so much as walked by a traffic cam I want to know about it." Kelly nodded and punched the instructions into her cell phone, passing them on to Adam 'the tech guy', another member of their team, another former SHIELD agent who'd heeded Captain America's call rather than HYDRA's. Sharon took a deep, steadying breath, instantly regretting the action as the rotten smell fills her airways, but pushes through anyway. It's just as bad as she thought it would be. Sharon has seen her fair share of cruelty in her line of work, but there's something about children being on the receiving end that makes her stomach jolt and her throat constrict. The youngest of the five infants in front of them is just four months old, the oldest just shy of seven. There are three girls and two boys. One of the cots, if one can call the bare, cold boxes that, is empty.
"Any trace of this baby?" Sharon asked, lightly tapping the rim of the box in question with a gloved finger. Kelly shook her head.
"There's no surveillance down here." she said, carefully cataloguing the files on the boxes and packing them up for transport to their labs. "Do you think she might still be alive?"
Sharon nods slowly. It's more of a gut feeling as of yet, but they know that someone broke into the facility and discovered this room and the dead infants in it. They left a clear trail and went to the trouble of tipping off the authorities. It's informed more by hope than evidence at this point, but she hopes that somehow baby number five was still alive when the mystery caller arrived and that he may have taken her to safety. The theory that this one baby was all HYDRA could in the end glean from their experiment and removed for further research is a line of thought she cannot yet entertain, not while she is down there in that room with five dead babies.