Dark Avengers: The Patriot List, page 1
part #2 of Marvel Untold Series
The patriot list
Bullseye smiled and tapped his finger on the desk by the guard’s computer keyboard. “Eleventh floor. Pretty please.”
“I’m not… I’m not afraid of you.” The guard’s hand closed around something in her desk drawer. “This is America.”
“This is Osborn’s America, sweet cakes. The rest of us are just living in it.”
“Osborn gives me pills to stop me wanting to eat people,” Venom added. “They work sometimes.”
The guard pulled her hand from the drawer, clutching an X-26 military issue TASER.
Venom’s distended jaws snapped over the woman’s shoulders. There was a crunch of Kevlar, a gristly choking sound as Venom tried to swallow the guard while dangling upside down above her desk.
“Gross,” said Bullseye, and slurped the dead woman’s shake.
Banana. His favorite.
It was great being good.
FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING
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© 2021 MARVEL
First published by Aconyte Books in 2021
ISBN 978 1 83908 064 7
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 065 4
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Cover art by Fabio Listrani
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The world has been saved from alien invasion. The failed planetary defense organization, S.H.I.E.L.D. has been disbanded. Its leaders are disgraced and in hiding. The citizens of Earth have a new hero.
His name is Norman Osborn.
And he approves these Avengers.
Prologue
Several dozen large TV screens bathed Norman Osborn’s suite of subterranean offices in an inconstant glow. It was the nearest that Norman had come to bathing in ninety-six hours. He was in the same white collared shirt and dark green tie that he had been wearing on his flight into Andrews Air Force Base on Friday afternoon.
It was now Monday. The middle of the night.
Sleep was for less material men.
Dark rings of sweat conspired to occupy large swathes of his shirt, spreading outwards from several points of incursion at once. His tie had been pulled out around the neck and now lay over his chest as though something had crawled onto his shoulder and died. His media team were forever advising him to avoid being photographed wearing anything green. “Negative associations in the public subconscious,” they said, but damned if you could get in front of the Joint Chiefs without a tie, and it was the only one his staff had been able to find aboard the Quinjet without notice.
Victoria had been fuming. “Green ties don’t find their way into the H.A.M.M.E.R. director’s wardrobe on their own.” She had threatened to fire the entire staff. But Norman had bigger worries than what color he was seen wearing on page nine of the Washington Post, or the jobs of a few aides.
He had actual worries.
Real worries.
The Secretary of Defense had summoned him to the Pentagon to discuss the unrest that was currently spreading across the Middle East from East Africa. Not that any of the men and women around that table had given a damn about what was happening halfway around the world, beyond how it made them look at home.
It was almost enough to make a person laugh.
On the multiplexed screens that made up one wall of his office, the regional networks played out soundless images of protest and riots. Baghdad. Cairo. Dar es Salaam. Repeating over and over on an endless loop of rolling news. On one screen, the picture carrying the digital stamp of Kenya NMG alongside the scrolling Swahili banner text, showed masked men waving placards as they stormed a H.A.M.M.E.R. facility in Kisumu. Another, from Al Jazeera, had civilians fleeing through the streets of Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. Norman scribbled an urgent memo to himself to find out who commanded Sana’a station and see that they got a huge pay rise and a promotion.
When he was finished, he looked down at the deranged handwriting.
He could barely read it.
Tearing the top sheet from the memo pad, he scrunched it up and threw it away. In a day or two, perhaps. After the situation in the world had calmed down. There was no sense in making things worse.
As far as Norman had been briefed, the locals in these countries didn’t seem to appreciate the S.H.I.E.L.D. outposts, situated in their territories since the Second World War, being unilaterally taken over by H.A.M.M.E.R. Nor did their governments approve, it seemed, of the manner in which a number of senior agents, liaison staff, and Nick Fury’s protégés, had been replaced, extradited to the US, or mysteriously disappeared over international waters. Nor were they hugely enamored of the fact that Norman Osborn himself was an appointment of the president of the United States.
Where did they think Fury had come from exactly?
The sky?
Seething under the cold gray light of the screens, he fed the bitterness he felt at the world’s ingratitude, goaded the anger. Did they have the slightest idea what he did for them, the threats he dealt with every day so that their children could sleep safely at night? Or did they know, but think that someone with a different-colored passport could do it better?
At the same time, half an eye on the news broadcasts, he studied the summary pages of the quarterly financial report, apprised himself of the latest updates from the R&D division, familiarized himself with the field reports from Ares’ new spec-ops unit, skimmed the covert surveillance he had placed on his various children around the world, and drafted a press release on the “Restive Minority” in the Middle East to be ready for the Monday morning news. He popped a pill bottle without reading the label and took two with a glass of water.
Norman rarely needed more than a few hours’ sleep a night. His mind had always been able to run in several directions at once. He didn’t see why nobody else’s could. It demonstrated a tragic inadequacy of will on their part.
Was it any wonder then, that lesser people should find the time to wash and eat and clothe themselves and–
He turned sharply in his chair.
Victoria Hand finished clearing her throat.
H.A.M.M.E.R.’s deputy director was a young woman with the stern, icy features common to such highly driven individuals. Her black hair was drawn tightly back into a long ponytail, a few red-dyed strands of loose fringe looping over the smart lenses of her glasses. She was wearing a lavender skirt suit with a Glock 18 holstered inside the jacket. She looked sharp at any time of day. Or night.
“What is it, Ms Hand?” he asked, in tight control of his demeanor in spite of his impulse to snap. “As you can probably see, I am the living definition of very busy.”
“Sir, you’ve been working non-stop on this all weekend. You need to learn to delegate.”
“I don’t trust anyone else to do what needs to be done, or to do it right. I won’t fail the way Stark and Fury failed. I won’t give them that satisfaction.” He gestured, idly, as though the vast wall of screens simply happened to be on in the background. “Are they ungrateful, do you think, Ms Hand? Or suffering from some kind of collective paramnesia? I remember the pictures from Tehran and Nairobi after my appointment. They were as happy to be saved from the Skrull invasion of Earth as any American citizen.”
“What I think, sir, is that you need to rest. The world needs you. Your best you. It doesn’t need…” she looked down at him, her business-like outer shell softened by her obvious concern for his wellbeing, “…this.”
Norman pulled his eyes from the screen. He looked at her for a moment, his anger at the world subsiding. “You came for something, Ms Hand. What is it?”
Victoria sighed, seemingly reluctant now, having come this far, and handed him a piece of paper.
“A reporter called. For you. Asking for a comment on this.”
Norman took it.
He read what was on it.
“Where did she get this?” he hissed, the mask he wore every day slippin
“Where?” Norman repeated.
“She didn’t say.”
“Did you even ask?”
“She didn’t talk to me,” said Victoria, firmly. Deputy Hand was one of the few people in this building, in the country, that refused to be bullied by Norman Osborn. It was why Norman had hired her in the first place. “She telephoned H.A.M.M.E.R.’s media department.”
“All right,” said Norman, composing himself. “Fire them all.”
“Sir?”
“The entire department. And gag them. Literally. Or legally. I don’t care which. Is any of this in the public domain yet?”
“Not yet, sir. I told them that someone would get back to her with a comment.”
“Good.” Norman crumpled the memo in his fist. “Assemble the Avengers.”
“Sir, do you really think that–”
“You wanted me to delegate, Ms Hand, so I am delegating. Send in the Avengers.” Smoothing the dark green tie over his crumpled shirt, he sat back in his chair and returned his captive attention to the wall of screens, the manifest ingratitude of about four billion people for Norman Virgil Osborn on a twenty-four-hour loop. “They need to be reminded who the heroes are.”
Part One
New York
Chapter One
Great Being Good
The New York Bulletin occupied the eleventh floor of a building on East 53rd.
Bullseye didn’t read newspapers. Not since he’d discovered YouTube. But the Bulletin was one of those that even a native New Yorker would be amazed to learn still existed. Instead of the grisly crime sprees and costumed vigilantes that filled the breathless reportage of the Bugle, the Bulletin went in for the kind of serious local journalism that the internet was supposed to have killed off already and that nobody had ever read anyway. The Daily Bugle, meanwhile, had a glossy forty-six story skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, while the Bulletin was here, sharing premises with a low-rent law firm, a couple of ESU spin-outs, and a lot of empty office space belonging to a Symkarian tax exile.
The Bugle probably didn’t get midnight calls from Avengers with seriously ticked off bosses either.
Go figure.
The reception desk was in the ground floor lobby, black and chrome and big enough to stop a bus. During work hours there would have been a receptionist, pretty probably, with a light smile and breezy telephone manner. Bullseye would have preferred to be doing this during work hours, and not just for the probably pretty receptionist. Witnesses were inevitable, even at night, and a daytime visit was easier to explain.
And, not least, because he’d barely had a night off in weeks.
If he’d known that being an Avenger would be so much like work, he’d have told Osborn where he could stuff it, and seen out his tour with the Thunderbolts in peace.
The woman behind the desk looked up as he pushed his way through the doors and shrugged off the cold.
She was a little under average height, somewhere in her fifties, with gray hair in a tight bob and faded tattoos across her knuckles. She was wearing a black ballistic vest with the corporate logo of a private security firm emblazoned across the breast panel. There was something about her, in the way she sat, that put Bullseye instantly on alert. She was lounging back in a swivel chair, reading from a battered thriller novel in a plastic library sleeve, a single desk lamp and a couple of black and white security monitors the only sources of light. A large milkshake from the Turkish place across the street sat on the desk in a puffy Styrofoam cup.
What Bullseye saw was a skin-deep veneer of relaxation over a wire-taut core of aggressive watchfulness.
It said ex-military, and not especially happy about the ex part either.
Her eyes widened a little as Bullseye approached. She set down the book. “Hey, you’re Hawkeye. I saw you on TV. That was some good work you guys did out in San Francisco.”
Bullseye smirked at her.
Spending a weekend shooting at peaceful protestors and putting down west coast mutant kids had done it for him, too. And who could have imagined it would be so popular with Joe Public as well? Osborn had spent a whole week almost happy. Even after having his backside handed to him by the X-Men on live TV. Bullseye had turned the thirty-second clip of him getting pasted by Cyclops into the screensaver on the giant display in the Avengers Tower briefing room.
The guard gestured enthusiastically to one of the visitor chairs. “What can I do for you, buddy?”
Bullseye remained standing. “I need you to let me through to the eleventh floor.”
“The Bulletin offices?”
“One of their reporters has been a naughty girl. It seems she’s gotten hold of something she shouldn’t have.”
The guard sucked in through her teeth and shook her head. “No one there right now.”
“Yeah, that’s probably best.”
“I’m sorry.” The woman spread her hands. “I can’t let you up without the nod from my boss.” She opened up a drawer and pulled out a pad of post-it notes. She started rooting around for a pen. “I can give you her cell.”
Bullseye glanced up. He marked the CCTV cameras, two of them in the rear corners, their angles covering the entrance and intersecting at the security desk, and idly fantasized about stabbing the night guard through the eye with a milkshake straw or slicing her carotid artery with a bookmark. “Look. Your boss works for my boss. Everyone in this country with a gun and a badge is pretty much working for my boss. So just open the damned elevator.”
“I don’t wear a badge. And maybe your boss should have got himself a warrant.”
Bullseye leant across the desk. His body armor, a flexible composite of carbon steel and fiberglass painted in a deep shade of purple, creaked menacingly. “I’m an Avenger, you know.”
“I know. I’ve seen you on TV.”
She reached back into the desk drawer.
For a weapon, probably.
Bullseye hoped it was a weapon.
“Don’t make me ask this guy to cut in.” His gaze flicked upwards.
The woman followed his eyes.
“Hi.”
Spider-Man, or the thing that a combination of powerful drugs and exceptional PR had somehow tricked a gullible planet into believing was Spider-Man, dangled from the lobby’s high ceiling by a thread of glistening black slime. He looked more-or-less humanoid, an athletic physique wrapped in a black latex suit, but his upper body was dribbling like candlewax, running towards a head that was already looking too large and was too full of teeth by half. The smell, though, was something else altogether, and the thing that the TV cameras just couldn’t catch. He stank like something that had been cut open and left to die in a sewer.
And Bullseye should know.
“He hates the mainstream media,” said Bullseye.
“I hate them a lot.”
“And he hates newspaper people most of all.”
“I want to eat them.”
Bullseye smiled indulgently and tapped his finger on the desk by the woman’s computer keyboard. “Eleventh floor. Pretty please.”
“I’m not… I’m not afraid of you.” Her gaze was fixed upwards. Venom was annoying as hell, but he had a way of getting a person’s attention. Her hand closed around something in her desk drawer. Bullseye saw the flex in her bicep and the stiffening of the tendons in her arms. Definitely ex-military. But Bullseye doubted she’d seen anything close to what she was asking for right now. “This is America.”
“This is Osborn’s America, sweet cakes. The rest of us are just living in it.”
“Osborn gives me pills to stop me wanting to eat people,” Venom added. His jaw hung open, too wide, his neck stretching as though his head was weighted and his spine was made of warm plastic. Disgusting alien goo dribbled onto the expensive tiles and over the surface of the black and chrome desk. “They work sometimes.”
The guard pulled her hand from the drawer, clutching an X-26 military issue TASER.
