Read The Ultimates: Against All Enemies for Free Online Page B

out the door. "Then turn your phone off and come back, and we'll talk until he wakes up."
    The cell phone prohibition extended out into the main corridor, and Steve kept on walking until he was outside. Why was Admiral Garza calling him instead of Nick Fury? The soldier in Steve didn't like circumventions of the chain of command. He called Garza back, though, as soon as he'd gotten away from the crowded sidewalks around the hospital.
    Garza picked up on the first ring. "Captain Rogers," he said without preamble.
    "Admiral," Steve said. "I was visiting a friend in the hospital."
    "Is he dying?" Garza asked.
    "Not right now."
    "Then get to the Triskelion. I'll have a chopper there. I need you at Andrews pronto." Three hours later, Steve was walking alongside Garza down an underground hallway that could be entered only through a triple-keycarded steel door in the basement of an anonymous Quonset hut set all the way out at the western perimeter of the base. "This was brought in to us last night," Garza said, "and the first time I saw it was this morning. I believe you'll be able to offer an expert opinion." They came to a dead end, with another featureless steel door in front of them. It had been a long time since Steve saw a sign. We're off the map, he thought. This place doesn't exist. Remembering his conversation with Fury the night before, he thought: this is where the boogeymen live. Admiral Garza slid his keycard through a slot. A panel opened in the wall, exposing a keyboard, and he entered a long alphanumeric code. The door opened to reveal a small room, and Steve followed Garza into it. Garza's keycard was waiting in a tray on the other side. The room was a white cube with a single workstation and another door on the wall opposite the one they'd come in. At the workstation sat a pale woman with gray-shot blond hair and haunted eyes. She stood when they entered.
    "Admiral Garza," she said, then looked Steve up and down. "And you must be Captain America."
    "Steve Rogers," he said, and extended his hand.
    She didn't take it. "I assume you're here to observe the specimen?" she asked Admiral Garza.
    "No, Justine, we thought we'd take you to lunch. Cap, meet Justine Ichesco." Garza walked over to the other door.
    This time access involved a complicated series of key-card readings, code entries, and simultaneous turnings of physical keys. Everything but a secret handshake, Steve thought. The door opened and they went into a larger room, one wall of which was obviously one-way glass. So we're being observed, Steve thought... and then his attention was riveted to the thing on the steel laboratory table in the middle of the room.
    It had the rough shape of a man: bipedal, bilaterally symmetric, and so forth. But it was more than seven feet tall, and its limbs were deformed, each a different length than the other and each jointed in a slightly different way. But it was the face that Steve couldn't look away from. Scrambled somehow, as if a late Picasso had been given flesh, the face brought to mind another malformed humanoid, in the Arizona desert, with fire and falling steel all around...
    "They do that when they've been badly injured," he said, keeping his voice level. "Lose their cohesion."
    "So you're sure it's Chitauri?" Garza asked.
    "I'm sure," Steve said.
    "Sampling matches existing specimens of recovered Chitauri tissue," Justine said. Garza stepped closer to the strapped-down body. "Well, this one's a ways past injured," he said. "We killed it on the base perimeter last night."
    "Then you can expect its shape to scramble even more," Steve said. Justine walked around to the other side of it. "How many of these have you seen?" Steve remembered starships falling from the desert sky.
    The Chitauri opened its eyes.
    Steve felt the adrenaline shock like a punch in the chest, his super-soldier overdrive kicking in. The Chitauri snapped the straps holding it down, wrenching the table loose from the floor. One of its hands shot out