Buzzkill: The Reckoning

Chapter 53

Steve tried to slow the rising panic building in his chest. He turned his head to look towards the rest of the team, all of them unaware. "Can you stop it?" He asked, turning his focus back toward Syd, "Can you stop it from going off?"

"I don't know yet," She replied honestly. "I'll have to continue scanning and looking at this detonation to see if it's built on a chain reaction or singled out."

"How long will it take you to find out? Do we know when it's going to go off?" Steve asked, his weight heavy as his feet seemed to root further to the ground.

"It'll take me a minute, tops, to find everything we need to know," Syd replied.

Steve nodded, looking back to the team once more. "Give me an update as soon as you can." He strode over to the other side of the room, standing next to Natasha. The rest of the team filed in the room and locked the lab door.

"The rest of them seem to be evacuating," Sam explained, holstering his pistols. "There doesn't look like there will be more agents making their way to this side of the building. Dani said they're all hoarding to the south side, probably gathering up whatever equipment they can."

"Mage will be down there then," Bucky said. "Nat, do you have the cameras?"

"Yep," She replied quickly. "Just going through to find Mage and Kal. It looks like our hallways are clear, at least for now."

Ruth looked to Steve to see his bewildered expression. "Steve, what's going on?" She peeked around him to see Syd with her hands inside a concrete wall.

Just as Steve opened his mouth, Syd ran over, "I got it, Cap."

"Got what?" Ruth asked.

"The building's rigged with explosives. There has to be at least thirty detonation points," Syd started.

The entire mood in the room shifted, everyone's attention on her.

"It looks like there are two in this lab alone. I can't exactly pinpoint where the rest will be, but they're scattered throughout each room, each floor," Syd continued. She shook her head, "We have to evacuate now. It's not a chain reaction. Each system is individually wired."

"What does that mean?" Sam asked.

"Even if you disable one bomb, the rest will still go off. Even if I knew where all the bombs were and could quickly deactivate them, I wouldn't have the time to get them all."

Ruth could feel Bucky's gaze turned to her. "How much time do we have?"

Syd held out her phone for everyone to see, "Twelve minutes."

"We gotta get Mage and Kal and get out of here," Ruth blurted out.

"There isn't time," Steve insisted. "By the time we grabbed them we wouldn't be able to make it out of the blast radius."

"You said you knew where the bombs are in this room, right?" Natasha spoke up, her tone the calmest, matching Syd's.

Syd nodded.

"Where's the next closest detonation?"

"Down the hallway in the next room to the right," Syd replied.

"If we leave now then everything in this facility would be destroyed," Nat explained, speaking to everyone. "We wouldn't get Mage or Kal, and we'd lose everything that we have here from Hydra. But if we're able to disarm the charges in this room, barricade the doors, we might be able to keep the lab secure."