The bridge took eleven minutes.
He didn't count them at the time. He reconstructed the eleven minutes afterward from what he remembered: the abandoned cars on the roadway, doors open, one still playing the radio. The soldiers on the towers above watching the walkway not the road, their attention pulled to the greater density of civilians there. The sound the East River made when the wind was wrong, the same sound he'd heard from this bridge before, but with something underneath it now that wasn't wind.. Felicia three feet to his right the whole span, not speaking, watching their flanks. The Brooklyn anchorage arriving. The descent into Red Hook.
They didn't see a single soldier on the roadway. He didn't know why and didn't stop to understand it. He kept moving.
Red Hook was quieter than Manhattan. Not safe, nothing was safe today, but quieter, the industrial streets mostly empty, the swarm thinner here, the few soldiers he spotted moving with purpose rather than spreading. He took them off the main streets and through the back route to the warehouse, the one he used after late operations, and they reached it without contact.
He unlocked the door.
Inside was the warehouse. His desk upstairs, the camera feeds, the weapons cabinet. All of it exactly as he'd left it that morning when he'd gone to meet her on Bleecker Street for what was supposed to be a quiet afternoon.
She'd been here enough times that she moved through the ground floor without looking for the light switches. He watched her go straight to the workbench, muscle memory, and then stop and look at her hands for a second and process what that meant about how often she'd stood at that workbench. He went to the weapons cabinet.
Rail Gun. EMP Launcher. Up-n-Atomizer. He loaded out properly, not the single pistol from the Panel, the full inventory, weapons slotted and confirmed. The mask last. He put it on and felt the voice modulator engage and looked at the vehicle bay and the Ramp Truck and the door beyond it and thought: seven miles to the Verrazzano if they took the BQE south, more if the expressway was blocked. Manageable.
He turned around.
She'd gone to the side room. He heard the door, heard the small sounds of her moving through it, the room where she kept things at the warehouse, had kept things for four months now, a coat first and then more, her costume there since March when she'd stopped taking it with her after jobs because there was no reason to when she was always coming back. She came out in the Black Cat suit and her mask and looked at him across the warehouse floor.
He'd worked with her for nine months. He'd been with her for three weeks in whatever way the last three weeks had been. He had never seen her in full operational gear while he was in full operational gear in the same space at the same time.
She looked at him. He looked at her.
Neither of them said anything. There wasn't anything to say. This was just the true version of both of them, present simultaneously, and it fit. No commentary required.
He pushed a button on the desk and the vehicle bay moved. it spilt in the middle and slowly retracted and out camp a Ramp Truck rising up.
She looked at the Ramp Truck. "That's new."
"Since May."
She walked around it slowly, one hand along the armor plating. She looked at the hydraulic ramp housing on the front, the reinforced push bar, the gun ports on the sides. She looked at the roof mount. She stopped at the passenger door and looked at him over the roof.
"What does it do?"
"Mostly what it looks like it does." He went to the driver's side. "Get in."
She got in. He started the engine, the Ramp Truck had a sound that no civilian vehicle had, something deep and settled, the sound of a machine with a serious answer to the question of what it was for. He pulled up the Panel and ran through the vehicle systems. Ramp mechanism, functional. Gun ports, armed. Armour integrity, full. He'd fuelled it last week. He released the parking brake and looked at the bay door and then at the camera feeds on the wall screen, checking the immediate exterior.
Clear for now.
"Where are we going?" she said.
"Out of the city. South on the BQE, over the Goethals if it's passable, into Jersey." He pulled forward to the bay door. "Away from this."
She was quiet for a moment. He knew what the quiet contained, the same thing his silence would have contained if she'd said it first. They were leaving. The city outside was full of people who needed help and they had a vehicle that could help them and they were leaving. He'd made that decision already, clean and clear, and it was the right decision because two people in one armed truck were not going to change the outcome of an alien invasion and dying here served nothing. The Avengers were overhead. The FF were somewhere in this. The city had people who could handle this at the scale it required. He was not those people and pretending otherwise was ego, not heroism.
He believed all of this. It still sat heavily.
"Yes," she said. Not answering a question. Just confirming she'd reached the same place and was at peace with it, or as close to peace as the situation allowed.
He hit the bay door release.
The door rolled up and the Red Hook afternoon came in, the sound of the city at war, distant enough here to be almost abstract, almost weather. He drove the Ramp Truck out into it.
I know its a small chapter that all i could right.