Mike's hair stood on end.
He whipped around, yanked the pistol from his hip, and leveled it squarely at the statue.
But the statue still stood there, exactly where it had been a moment ago.
As if what he'd just felt was nothing but nerves.
"Damn it… I'm too wound up."
Exhaling, Mike stepped closer and rapped the statue with his knuckles.
Tok, tok.
Solid.
His guard dropped. He gave a self-mocking shake of the head, holstered the gun, and turned to go.
"There's nothing he—"
The instant he pivoted, an icy force clamped onto the back of his neck.
Crack!
The clean, brittle pop of snapping vertebrae sliced through the silent warehouse.
Mike's body locked.
His head swiveled a full one-eighty at a crooked, impossible angle—staring straight back the way he'd come.
And there it was: that ugly, spray-painted face, no more than two inches from his own.
"Sta… tue…"
Mustering the last scrap of will, he forced a garbled syllable into his comm.
Then everything went dark.
—
Outside the warehouse.
Through the open channel, Johnson heard that tooth-aching grind of bone—and Mike's final, muddled word.
The lazy smirk vanished from his face.
Predator-still, eyes sharp as a cat's, he eased backward, opening the distance from the black maw of the warehouse door.
He tapped his comm, voice going flat and utterly professional.
"Sir, Johnson reporting."
"Mike—confirmed KIA."
"We're at underground warehouse… *... 173. We've been engaged."
On the other end, Phil Coulson's mind rang like a struck bell.
Dead?
They'd been in the field less than ten minutes and already had their first casualty?
"Johnson!" Phil snapped, voice suddenly hard and urgent. "Hold position. No movement. I repeat—no movement!"
When facing the unknown, nothing was more dangerous than rashness.
He flipped to the open channel and barked orders to every unit.
"All units! All units! Abort current searches—rally on underground warehouse 173! Move, move!"
Across Hell's Kitchen, agents seeped out of alleys and doorways like stirred hornets, arrowing toward a single set of coordinates.
In under three minutes, ten fully kitted agents had formed up around Phil.
Every one of them was S.H.I.E.L.D. elite—yet every face was tight with dread.
Phil counted heads, and his stomach dropped.
"We brought fourteen," he said, throat dry. "Why do I only see ten?"
Johnson's jaw was clenched. "Sir, Mike's down." A beat. "Pick, Jesse, and Tom said they were checking the next block. We can't raise them."
The words had barely left his mouth when—
"Skrrt—h-help! Help!"
Pick's voice detonated across the net—pure panic and pain.
"We're in Alley 96! It… it's coming— AHH—!"
The scream cut off almost instantly, drowned by a wet, animal tearing that set every scalp crawling.
Then: dead air.
Silence crushed the team.
Shock and disbelief were written on every face.
Phil's went paper-white.
He understood now.
This was worse. A thousand times worse.
They weren't facing one threat.
They were facing two.
Two monsters, hunting his people at the same time, in different places, in different ways.
—
Triskelion, S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ.
In the office, the hard-light projections of Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce still hovered as they discussed the "S.H.I.E.L.D. Parasite Initiative."
Neither of them knew their handpicked "parasites"—the first wave of elite agents embedded into the wild—were walking into a near-total wipeout.
—
New York City, Hell's Kitchen.
Cold night wind dragged the sour stink of trash across streets gone dead quiet.
Phil and his D-Class Advance Team stood at the mouth of Warehouse 173, the air so tense it hummed.
"Johnson, you sure the thing is in there?" Phil rasped, forcing himself to think.
"Not sure, sir," Johnson said, puzzled and grim. "Mike died here, but Pick's team… got hit on another street. I think… we're not dealing with just one."
Another weight landed in Phil's chest.
Two unknown anomalies loose in one of the most crowded cities on Earth.
This wasn't a containment slip.
It was a catastrophe.
"We go in. Eyes up." Phil made the call. "Deploy remote camera. Everyone—maximum alert!"
An agent slid a spider-like scout bot from his pack and sent it skittering into the dark.
Night-vision HD fed straight into every tactical visor.
The warehouse was empty. Hollow. Quiet.
They found Mike in a corner.
He lay on his back, eyes locked wide, terror frozen on his face. His head was twisted at a grotesque angle toward his rear.
The chill clawed up every spine.
Phil's gaze swept the interior.
Then he saw it: an ugly, rough-cast concrete statue in the middle of the floor.
He frowned—tacky junk—but clocked nothing else.
To him, it was just a discarded, tasteless sculpture.
And there it "stood," perfectly still.
Dozens of wary eyes pinned it.
It waited.
Waited for even one person… to blink.
(End of Chapter)
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