At this point, the only real difference between Bullseye and a corpse was that corpses didn't breathe.
He lay face-down in a grotesquely twisted position, foam bubbling from his mouth, clearly deep in shock from a level of pain and terror his body and mind could no longer process.
"Clear! Target secured!" One of the SWAT officers rushed forward and kicked Bullseye onto his back. The moment he saw what condition the man was in, even this veteran officer sucked in a breath. "Sir... this guy's hands, legs, and spine... it looks like someone crushed them with some kind of unbelievably powerful blunt-force trauma. Just pulverized them."
George kept his gun in hand as his eyes swept the room.
No suspicious figure.
The window was intact.
The ventilation shaft showed no signs of being opened.
Whoever had done this had vanished right in front of everyone's eyes.
George moved quickly to the bed. Eddie was weak, but the machines connected to him showed stable readings, even slightly better than before.
"Eddie, are you still with me? What happened in here just now?" George asked in a lowered voice.
Eddie forced his eyes open and looked at the familiar face in front of him.
"Uncle Stacy... I saw... a guy in a black hoodie... he... he caught a grenade with his bare hand... and crushed it out..."
Hearing that, George Stacy felt like his brain had left his body.
Physics no longer existed.
Crushed a grenade with his bare hand?
Part of him wanted to think Eddie had simply misseen it in that state, but the evidence in the room didn't lie.
George turned toward the corridor.
On the way up, he had expected to see dead SWAT officers all over the floor.
The lights in the hallway had been destroyed, and communications had gone dead.
But what he found instead was something he still couldn't fully accept.
The officers Bullseye had struck with scalpels and syringes were down, yes, but every fatal wound had already been treated by some unimaginably precise burst of heat.
The scalpels that had severed nerves had been removed, and instead of massive bleeding, the blood vessels had been sealed cleanly, almost as if they'd undergone some perfect microsurgery.
Even the two officers who had been injected with air had somehow been treated. Someone had apparently pressed a finger to their chests and forcibly expelled the bubbles from the bloodstream. They were unconscious, but not in any immediate danger.
All of them had already been transferred to emergency for further care.
"Commissioner, ER just finished the first examinations," George's aide said as he approached, his face full of disbelief.
"The men in the hallway, every fatal injury they had was treated in a single instant. The ER doctors say modern medicine can't stop bleeding that fast or that cleanly. They aren't even sure they could've saved some of them if it had been left to ordinary treatment. It was almost like... some kind of miracle."
George felt like his head might split open.
He holstered his gun.
"Lock the whole scene down. Pull every piece of security footage. Now. I want to know why none of us saw any of this happen."
Ten minutes later.
In the monitoring room at New York General.
Commissioner Stacy stood in front of the large display while several technicians worked behind him, pulling up the footage from earlier.
Beside him stood a middle-aged man in a sharp suit with an increasingly doomed hairline.
Level Eight S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson.
"Sir, the footage has been recovered," one of the techs reported. "The corridor cameras on the tenth floor were destroyed, but we were able to pull the ICU room footage."
"Play it," George said.
The black-and-white ICU surveillance feed appeared on the screen, grainy and slightly distorted.
On it, Bullseye swaggered into the room and raised the pen to kill Eddie.
Every police officer in the room held their breath, waiting to finally see what had happened next.
Then, in the very next second, the footage erupted into static and violent distortion, like the camera had been hit by some enormous electromagnetic interference.
"What is that?" George frowned. "Why is the image breaking up?"
"Commissioner, some kind of unknown magnetic field disrupted the camera," the technician said, starting to sweat. "I'm trying to restore it frame by frame... wait. We've got a few partial frames that are a little clearer."
The image froze and began enlarging.
In the blurred static, a dark figure appeared at Eddie's bedside.
Even with the damaged recording and the technical cleanup, the shape of that man still carried a suffocating kind of pressure.
Next frame.
The figure's two fingers lightly pinched the pen out of the air. Even slowed to one-fiftieth speed, Clark had moved so fast that on the footage it looked as if his arm had barely moved at all.
Next frame.
Bullseye recoiled in visible fear, while the man only took a single step forward.
"Zoom in on his face," George ordered.
The technician magnified the image to the limit. At that point the pixels were nearly falling apart.
Between the black hood and the face mask, only the eyes were visible.
Even blurred that badly, everyone in the room could feel the expression in them.
Calm.
Deep.
No ordinary human anger.
No fear.
No bloodlust.
And yet that very calmness carried something loftier and colder than rage, like a being looking down on the world from far above it, seeing every killing trick and every scheming lie as a joke.
"My God..." One of the younger officers instinctively crossed himself.
For him, this was a challenge to his faith.
George fell silent.
He remembered the terror in Gargan's eyes in the interrogation room. He remembered what Eddie had just said about the grenade. He remembered the men in the hallway whose lives had been saved in an instant.
"He had the power to wipe out an entire SWAT team and blow apart half the hospital," George murmured, staring at the blurred figure on the screen, "but he didn't. He stopped the assassin. And he saved our people."
Coulson, who had stood silent until then, finally spoke.
He stared at those eyes on the screen, and in his mind he was already thinking of the one person S.H.I.E.L.D. had quietly watched for over a decade.
"Commissioner Stacy, I'd like the police to classify this footage at the highest possible level and transfer it to the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division." Coulson took out his credentials.
George turned to look at him and let out a short laugh.
"S.H.I.E.L.D.? You people in black suits, did you already know he existed? What is he, exactly? Some super-soldier variant? Some black-budget weapon?"
Coulson didn't answer directly.
"We're still looking for those answers ourselves, Commissioner," he said. "But one thing is certain. As long as he shows no hostility toward ordinary people, we absolutely cannot provoke him. Because if we do, the consequences are not something the NYPD, or the U.S. government, can currently afford."
Inside S.H.I.E.L.D., Clark had already been given a provisional internal rating. Their rough estimate placed him somewhere above an enhanced Captain America level, though no one really knew his upper limit.
There was still the Hulk above that line, of course. They had seen what he could do, and at the moment had no way to stop him either. On paper, he still looked even more destructive than Clark.
George looked at Coulson for a long moment, thought about the things S.H.I.E.L.D. had done before, and about the kind of responsibility they carried.
In the end, he let out a breath and signaled for the technicians to make Coulson a copy of the footage.
"At least tonight, he was on our side," George said, turning toward the window.
"Let's hope he stays there."