"Damn it!"
Nick, the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., led a band of exhausted agents, firing at the seemingly endless tide of infected swarming toward them while shouting to the technician protected in the center of the group.
"Still no contact with the Avengers?"
"No.
Nothing's getting through. Every signal at the Avengers Compound has been blocked. It's strange-the surveillance cameras are clearly still working."
Clutching a computer, the technician kept pace with the group, typing rapidly with one hand as he shouted his reply, sweat pouring down his face.
"If Tony Stark and the others could see what's happening outside, they should lift the lockdown and come help!"
Nick Fury's face darkened as he roared at the technician, "Try again!"
That brief distraction was all it took. An infected fearlessly leaped from the roof of a nearby high-rise, plummeting straight toward Nick Fury.
Fortunately, Hill quickly pulled Nick aside, then shot the infected in the head as they lay sprawled on the ground, blood gushing from their mouth and nose.
"They're insane. All of them. They aren't afraid of death, and they don't feel pain.
...But that damned pleasure just had to stay."
Nick Fury had broken into a cold sweat himself. He cursed at a large crowd of infected in the distance who were arranging multiplayer poker games, too engrossed in their pleasure to notice the commotion here.
Just one day earlier, this damned virus had suddenly appeared across the globe.
S.H.I.E.L.D. had immediately classified it as a threat requiring the highest level of alert.
As though it needed no time to spread, those disgusting infected had appeared everywhere in the world simultaneously. Unlike the zombies in conventional films and television shows, they delighted in constantly capturing living people for card games, then torturing them to death.
Every infected person