Chapter 17
‘DON’T TOUCH ANYYTHING UNLESS YOUR SURE OF WHAT IT DOES!’
‘THEN I CAN’T TOUCH ANY OF IT! HOW ELSE DO YOU EXPECT ME TO FIX IT?’
Fitz and Mack’s rather heated professional debate only added to the pounding in Jemma’s temples. The two engineers had been bickering back and forth as they inspected and dismantled the only lead they had on how to get out of – well, wherever this was. She didn’t have the technical know-how to assist, so she was left wracking her brain for the past several hours, trying to remember how they ended up here. She had been on the Zephyr with Bobbi, anxiously waiting for the rest of the team to return as the island they had landed on shook violently underneath them. The comms had cut – a painful static pulse in her ear – and then she was waking up on the floor, with Fitz staring anxiously down at her and roughly a dozen others she didn’t recognize in various stages of consciousness surrounding her. Mack and Fitz recounted a similar happening, they had been on the island, and then they were here; barricaded in a room with a heavy steel door with no handle and a defunct elevator.
The room was windowless and barren; devoid of any furnishings save some uncomfortable metal benches fixed to the walls. Checking once again on Bobbi’s unconscious form on what had become ‘their side’ of the room, Jemma’s eyes flickered across to where their new co-inhabitants had huddled together. When she had awoken, Mack had already taken the liberty of securing Gordon to one of the benches with his belt; an act that had not been greatly received by what they could only assume where the residents of the island. They remained tight lipped and wary, retreating to the other side of the room after an initial stand-off with Mack regarding the treatment of the unconscious teleporter.
‘Do I even want to know?’
Jemma almost jumped out of her skin as Bobbi spoke behind her, stretching with a pained grunt as she sat up from where Mack had laid across one of the metal benches.
‘There’s not much to know it seems’, Jemma supplied, coming to rest beside the blonde. There was no food here, or water, and pacing was a waste of energy and was doing nothing to help quell her nerves.
Her time away from SHIELD, albeit short, had clearly done the specialist well; Jemma hadn’t noticed until now that she seemed lighter somehow – more youthful – this job had the inexplicable habit of seeming to take years off your life while adding them to your body. Still, she recognized the calculating sweep of Bobbi’s gaze as it swept across the room, already analysing the situation as she had been trained to do, her eyes lingering on Gordon with a tight frown.
‘No Daisy?’
She had to credit the woman’s professionalism in the priority of her concerns; Hunter was also conspicuously absent.
‘Unfortunately not – Mack and Fitz didn’t see her before we ended up here but Fitz said that Hunter has been just ahead of him and he’s no here either’.
The confirmation only further furrowed the blonde’s brow – she didn’t need it pointed out to her that Hunter was unaccounted for.
‘I take it our new friends have been less than forthcoming about where ‘here’ is exactly?’
Jemma shook her head, ‘They seemed just as clueless as we were when they woke up here – and if they have any idea of a way out they haven’t made a move for it’
‘They know more than they’re letting on’, Bobbi added sourly as she observed them from across the room.
Jemma nodded her confirmation, she wasn’t trained like Bobbi or Mack but she hadn’t missed the tension of the hushed conversation taking place amongst the other group. There was a young girl amongst them, perhaps 5 or 6, that continued to sob quietly, inconsolable even by her own people; Jemma could only assume her mother was among the missing.
‘DAMN IT! DAMN IT! DAMN IT!’
Mack beat his fists furiously against the still closed elevator doors as the wires he had been carefully splicing together finally sparked and the control panel remained frustratingly blank.
‘If you thought we could beat the door down, we should have started with that!’ Fitz’s uncommon sarcasm was a sure sign that their elevator plans were quickly becoming a lost cause.
Mack didn’t take too kindly to his unhelpful input, but before things could become too colourful between the two, Bobbi silenced them; her eyes screwed shut, with her head tilted thoughtfully to the side.
‘Do you hear that?’
The whole room paused to listen, and for a moment all Jemma could hear was her own heartbeat in the sudden silence, and then, the tell-tale sound of….
‘Footsteps! There’s people out there – HEY – GET US OUT OF HERE!’
Fitz immediately rushed to the large metal door, beating his fists against it as he shouted, only to have Mack reel him backwards almost instantly.
‘Are you insane? We don’t know who’s out there – we don’t know where we are – for all we know this is hostile – ‘
His concerns were cut short as the doors flew inwards, and an unfamiliar man peered cautiously into the room. Before any of them could question him, an elderly woman from the other side of the room all but jumped into his arms, and more people quickly began to file into the room from behind him. Jemma assumed they were more inhabitants from the island and found herself watching the little girl as she peered hopefully amongst the crowd.
Her attention was quickly diverted as Bobbi suddenly rose to her feet from beside her, pushing past Fitz and Mack, her weapon raised at eye level and trained on the final man that came through the door. He didn’t look like a threat; his greying hair stood in untidy tufts but his wrinkled face was kind and he looked curiously amused as he inexplicably grinned at the woman who was pointing a gun in his face.
‘Oh don’t be like that love – I thought you had a thing for older man…’
Something about his voice had her straining to place it’s familiarity, but as always, Fitz was quicker to the conclusion;
‘Hunter?’
‘Lower your weapon Morse – Hunter, is that really you?’
His disbelief was apparent but Mack, like Jemma, clearly couldn’t deny the resemblance the elderly man shared their colleague. Before responding, he began pulling what looked like balled up cloth from his ears, and Jemma looked around as those he had arrived with followed suit.
‘Sorry about that boss man – I took some precautions in anticipation of my better half’s usually intensely vocal tendencies whenever I appear out of the blue surrounded by women’, Hunter’s cheeky grin was quickly stolen as Bobbi punched his shoulder, only mostly in jest.
‘Hey! That’s elder abuse you know!’
‘Well it’s obviously him – nobody in there right mind would pretend to be that much of an ass’, Bobbi breathed a shaky sigh of relief but confusion still clouded her features. Jemma knew how she felt – Hunter was clearly, well, Hunter, but looked to have aged 30-40 years in the short time they had been apart.
One of the young men who had arrived with Hunter stepped forward cautiously, with his hands half raised and an awkward smile as he approached them, clearly wary of the gun still held loosely in Bobbi’s grip and Mack’s – well – Mack-ness.
‘I’m glad we found you – your friend here seemed pretty certain that you guys would be able to help us find a way out of here?’
‘We might if we knew where ‘here’ was. Where did you come from – and why is Hunter….’
‘Old?’
The young man relaxed, an easy smile quirking his lips to one side as he finished Mack’s trailing sentence, ‘We weren’t all together at the start – we picked up more people while we were looking around – but everyone has pretty much the same story; one minute they were in Afterlife, the next they were waking up on the floor wherever this is. As for the other thing – I don’t know man, it seems like some people woke up old, some people young – I’ve never seen anything like it’.
Mack nodded, running a hand wearily over his face, clearly satisfied but not reassured by the explanation;
‘Afterlife – that’s the island where your teleporter took Daisy?’ Mack asked, gesturing towards the unconscious teleporter.
‘Yeah – that’s Gordon, and I’m Lincoln by the way, sorry, I don’t know anything about a Daisy but yeah, Afterlife is our home – was – our home, I guess’.
‘Did you come across any supplies on your way here? Food, water – more people?’
Mack added the last bit cautiously, Jemma had also noted Yo-yo’s conspicuous absence amongst the new group. The mechanic had reluctantly set to helping Fitz work on the elevator after they gave in to the fact they could not get through the door to go look for their missing friends – that Hunter had now appeared, aged without reason but ultimately safe – was distinctly less comforting considering Elena was not with him.
‘The place seems deserted, whatever it is – probably underground is about the only thing I could tell, I didn’t see any windows – we were going room to room searching for people but we had to take who we had and run for it – we only found you guys because your friend heard you banging on the door, even through the impromptu ear plugs’.
After being helped to sit his newly stiff limbs on one of the benches by his dumbfounded partner, Hunter re-joined the conversation,
‘Yeah, speaking of that – I take it by the fact you all still have 100% of your hearing that you didn’t hear anything from in here?’
‘Before you? Nothing, why?’
Hunter and Lincoln shared a look of relief at the confirmation before Hunter continued;
‘Link here says it isn’t one of their kind, that he knows of, but there’s something out there – it started wailing and it felt like my ears were going to start bleeding. We thought twice about opening anymore doors we didn’t have to and headed in the opposite direction’.
‘Do you think it was some sort of creature – or an Inhuman?’, Mack eyed the door cautiously, still propped open so they wouldn’t once again be sealed away but Hunter quickly shook his head;
‘I thought so at first but, honestly – it sounded like a kid’.
The blood in her hair was already dry when she came to, and she half expected to see a very pissed-off Mack sitting by her bedside in Medical when she opened her eyes but there was only darkness.
Sitting up slowly, Elena winced as her joints protested; judging by her stiffness she has been laying on the cold ground for quite some time. Squinting in the dim light provided by the tube lighting overhead, she tried to take stock of her surroundings as she rose to her feet. She was in the middle of a long corridor, interspersed with blank doors – so she apparently wasn’t being held prisoner, unless her captives had gotten distracted and simply dumped her in the hallway. It was eerily quiet; that soft groan that escaped her as she shuffled to her feet seemed to echo and then hang in her otherwise silent surrounds – wherever she was, she was alone.
Mentally retracing her steps was both unsuccessful and dizzying; her head ached and her thoughts didn’t seem to be running in a straight line. Somewhere behind her, the moaning of old pipes echoed in the silence and inside her head – she remembered the water, searing her skin and stealing her breath, pushing in all around her as she sank into the darkness. She shook off the ghost of the unexpected touch that sent shivers down her spine as she pulled herself out of her memories and headed in the directing of the pipes; she doubted that whatever had lain cold and still beneath that water was alive.
She had woken up without her phone or her weapon; and the first clock she came across as she searched through the abandoned rooms she passed was unhelpfully silent and still. With no way to tell the time, it stretched out before her, with nothing but the gnawing hunger building in her gut and the tiredness settling heavy in her limbs to gauge how long she had been roaming the seemingly empty facility. She was too tired and too dizzy to run, besides, running headlong into the unknown had almost gotten her killed once today already. However, as she turned what felt like the 100th corner of the maze-like web of corridors, she couldn’t help the urge to rush towards the only remarkable thing she had seen since waking up. Well, remarkable in the most plain sense of the word anyway.
A set of large partition doors stood at the end of the hallway; the type with large glass windows you’d see in a hospital, or a lab. Squinting through the glass when she reached them, there was nothing but more darkness beyond. With nothing more promising behind her, she went to push her way through the doors. For the briefest of moments, they didn’t budge, and her heart started to sink. There was no handles, no card reader on the wall to signal they were somehow electronically gated, so she leaned heavily against where they joined, heaving with all her might until they finally pushed inwards.
She immediately wished she hadn’t.
A piercing wail echoed through the hallways, seeming to drill in her ears and into her skull; not just loud, but painful. With her hands clamped tightly over her ears, she span on her heel to rush back through the doors she had initially been so happy to see. And then she stilled. It took a moment to place it but once she heard it she couldn’t unhear it; with her hands muffling the worst of the assault on her eardrums she could recognise the unmistakable sound of a babies cry. And so, cursing SHIELD and every decision she had ever made in her life to lead her here, she let the doors swing shut behind her and continued forward towards the sound.
By the time she deemed it safe to unclasp her hands from over her ears, her arms were like lead when she finally lowered them to her side. It had fallen quiet a few moments ago, and as she came upon an open doorway that lead into what seemed to be some sort of communal wet area, she decided to temporarily risk her ear drums in favour of using her hands. Rushing towards the row of sinks, Elena grabbed at the taps, twisting desperately to no avail, the prospect of accessing water reminding her of how parched she really was.
While her hopes of having something to drink were dashed, this new area did offer at least some more promising prospects. Unlike the rows upon rows and blank doorways and virtually empty rooms, the area beyond the partition appeared to have once had some sort of function. Wandering back out of the wet area, she was momentarily conflicted as she reached an intersection, with two identical corridors heading in opposite directions. She was still considering her options when the ear-piercing wailing started up again, but stopped almost just as suddenly. The sound echoed in her ears even after is stopped, leaving her disorientated and with no sense of which direction it had even come from. Squinting down the hallway to her left, she swore she could see the faintest shimmer of light reflecting off of glass – maybe more doors? Risking the additional exhaustion she knew it would bring, she decided to make use of her speed – with an end in sight she at least had something to run towards, instead of burning through all her energy in a seemingly endless maze.
She was close enough to see that she had been right about the doors when she skidded to a stop, still some distance away, and held her breath, straining to hear the source of the small sound she thought she had heard. She had almost convinced herself she had imagined it when she heard it again; the almost too quiet sound that had to be coming from the room just to her right. Cautiously, Elena paused just outside the door – from here the sound of the muffled sobs was undeniable.
The sound abruptly stops as Elena slowly opens the door, letting the small amount of light from the hallway spill into the darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out the form of a woman huddled in the far corner. She looks to be twisted uncomfortably, hunching in on herself but as Elena inched closer she could see there was a tiny infant suckling at her chest. The young woman is visibly shaking, but otherwise hadn’t reacted in any way to her presence and Elena forces herself to move slowly and cautiously towards her, edging further into the room;
‘Hey – are you hurt?’
The woman seems startled by her presence as she speaks softly to her, trying to shrink further against the wall and Elena continues hurriedly, trying to calm her;
‘It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you – my name is Elena, I’m with SHIELD – do you know where we are?’
The questions hangs unanswered between until the woman finally shakes her head to Elena’s surprise detaches the sleepy infant from her chest, who grumbles unhappily, and sets her on the ground between them. Before she could question her any further, the baby gave a discontented while that rung uncomfortably in her ears and Elena quickly bent to scoop her up. The baby girl snuffed unhappily at her chest as she cradled her, finding none of her mother’s warmth and sustenance but settled quickly in her arms. Elena could now see that to spite the baby seeming to be at least a few weeks old, her mother’s frame was still encumbered by the swell of her belly. With the baby now free from her arms, the woman slumped weakly to the floor, in the low light, she looked almost brittle, curling around herself as if she hoped she might just shrink out of existence. She must be exhausted.
‘Your baby is very beautiful’, Elena whispers softly as she sits carefully by her side, ‘what’s her name?’
The woman shakes her head so furiously it rocks her whole form and Elena worries momentarily that she might be convulsing until she finally rasps out;
‘Not mine – Daisy’
Elena finds herself facing a pair of haunted but familiar dark eyes, in an unfamiliar, gaunt face as the young woman finally meets her gaze;
‘Dios mio – May?’