Chapter 10
"Have you seen Simmons?" May called as she spotted Coulson coming down the hallway. There were a couple of agents on her list that she wanted the scientist to take a look at. They didn't seem bad yet, mild dehydration, she thought, but she wanted to have someone take a look before it could possibly get worse.
"She's probably in medical with Fitz. Have you checked there?" Coulson said as his phone rang. He pulled it out and sighed when he saw it was the director. Please let this be a call saying more help was on the way. They were doing alright so far, with all of the sick agents tended, and no serious illness yet, but if they had to manage for a week on their own…. How were they going to feed three hundred people? And that was just the worry that he had for after they got them over the first agonies of the flu. "Sir?"
"Just calling for an update on the situation." Fury said. "How are the infected agents?"
"They're sick with the flu. They're about how you would expect them to be, especially since this seems to be an extremely painful form of the virus. They're medicated, and Agent Simmons has plans for how to deal with the situation if anything serious crops up. Do you have any idea of when we'll be able to get back-up here? With how sick these people are, I honestly think having enough people on their feet and capable of running things in a week would take a miracle."
"Back-up, that's going to be a problem." Fury said after a moment's pause. Coulson wasn't going to like this. He didn't like this.
"Why? Have any other bases been hit with this?"
"We've got a few isolated cases at the Treehouse and the Fridge. Right now it looks like the majority of the effected batch of shots was distributed at the Hub, but there's a second issue. At least two more batches of the shots this company sold are believed to be defective and provide no protection from the flu."
"And we got shots from those batches." Fury didn't even have to say it. And until they figured out which agents had been left vulnerable and provided them with protection, back-up wasn't coming.
"Medical's saying at least a week to sort it out." Fury told him. "Can you update Victoria with what we know so far? If she isn't sleeping?"
"This is because I died once already, isn't it? Did you possibly negotiate a permanent "Get out of Death Free" card, because if so, I'd like to know about it." And he would probably need it if he was going to have to face a sick and sleepy Victoria and let her know that she had the flu due to a defective shot and the team that was driving her slowly insane was going to be playing nursemaid to her and her staff for the next few weeks. Before he could say anything else, there was suddenly a loud banging. What in the world?
"AC? May? Someone? Help!" Skye shouted. It had taken her so long, she was really afraid that it might have taken too long, to squirm down the vent, but thank goodness, she could finally hear something that she hoped was her team.
"Skye?" Coulson looked around, forgetting the phone in his hand as he tried to figure out where the voice was coming from. It sounded like it was coming from the wall. How could they be hearing Skye from inside a wall? "Where are you?" May was looking around too, trying to pinpoint the noise, and Ward was looking around in puzzlement as well as he hurried down another hall to join them.
"The wall. At least I think I'm in the wall. It should be the wall, anyway." Skye called as she banged again. "There's a vent opening, maybe two or three inches long, about a foot in front of me, if that helps. "AC, we've got a major problem!" She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to picture the distance she had came, trying to figure out how to lead them to Fitzsimmons and Agent Hand. If she messed it up…. As sick as she was, Agent Hand didn't have the time that might be lost by them wandering around multiple levels trying to locate the lab they were trapped in. "Thirty feet. That's three levels, right? Down about thirty feet and…" Skye jumped as something smacked into the opening she could see in front of her, tearing out a section of the wall.
"How did you get in there?" Coulson muttered as another hit from the sledgehammer May had somehow found in what seemed like five seconds knocked away more of the wall. He knelt and looked in, totally shocked. Skye was small, but how had se managed to fit in that space? It didn't look like she would even have enough room to breathe. "Hold on. We'll have you out in a minute." And he would have to think up something to tell Victoria to explain why there was a fresh hole in one of her walls.
"AC, don't worry about me! You need to get downstairs NOW!" But the hammer slammed into the wall again and again, blocking out her words. Skye closed her eyes, tears starting to burn as she imagined what the delay that freeing her could mean for Agent Hand.
But faster than expected, there were hands reaching in and tugging at her, and then she was popping free of the vent, coughing from the dust.
"Skye, are you alright?" Ward asked.
"What were you doing in that wall?" Coulson added, not even noticing the phone that he was still holding, and the director's voice demanding to know why he was hearing a sledgehammer.
"Going for help." Skye forced herself to breathe deeply, to stop coughing so she could make them understand her. "Agent Hand, she was trying to lock down the labs. She must have realized they were still unsecured after she locked down the computers, because she had to do it manually. Something's wrong in this lab someone turned into a storeroom down on the lowest level, or I think it's the lowest level. The door malfunctioned and she got locked in." And who knows how long she had been in there before they found her? "She was on my list, but I put off looking in on her until last and then we couldn't find her. Fitzsimmons helped me look and then we all ended up locked in too when we found her. We need to get down there now and get them out. She's sick, she's really, really sick."
"How bad? One of you go and get a stretcher." Coulson ordered. "Skye?"
"IVs, too, and cooling blankets." Hadn't Jemma mentioned cooling blankets back on the BUS what felt like a lifetime ago? That sounded like something that might help didn't it? "It's really, really bad. Jemma gave her medicine, but her temperature kept going up instead of coming down. She's dehydrated and it was making her sick trying to drink anything. Jemma thought she was about to have a seizure right before I left. Her temperature had hit 106.2. She said if that happened, she would either die or be brain damaged."
Coulson paled, and the phone slipped from his fingers. "Dying? Jemma said she was…."
"Without help, pretty much, yes. She didn't have any more medicine or equipment to do anything else for her." Skye whispered as they hurried towards the nearest elevator, May and Ward behind them with a stretcher that had almost appeared out of nowhere. Did Shield teach their specialists superspeed or something? But she would think about that later. Just please let them be in time now.
"Sir, did I just hear what I thought I heard?" Maria Hill asked, having come in just in time to hear the last of what Coulson had said. "She's…. It's the flu. They haven't even been sick a day, and Victoria's dying from it?" Surely she had misheard, or maybe Coulson's hacker had been confused.
"Get someone from medical up here now!" Not that they could do much, but if he was about to loose a good level 8 agent, he wanted a very good explanation as to why, and heads were going to roll once he found out who was to blame.