ACT 1: REBIRTH

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June 11th 1944

The Enhanced Medical Experiment Unit had been based the Infectious Diseases Hospital at Roundway Down, Wiltshire. All civilian staff and patients had left, when the isolated wooden huts and central laboratory had been requisitioned by the War Department in 1942. All that was left of the Unit was now a crater filled with a soldering pile of rubble, twisted metal and ash. Only the wire fence and checkpoints survived the blast from a direct hit from the Hydra 'super weapon'. All evidence of Project Ophion had been wiped from the face of the earth. The volunteers and medical personnel had lived under strict quarantine conditions here. All were now dead as nothing could have survived that blast. All samples of the serum and the research notes were lost.

Captain Charles Morris of the Military Intelligence had interviewed the six guards from his regiment who had survived. He had nothing to report to his superiors in Whitehall except that there was now no chance of a British super soldier joining Captain America to ensure an allied victory. By dusk, all military personnel had been reassigned. No one was on site to witness a sole survivor digging himself from the rubble.

Twenty-four year old Sergeant Jack Rider of the Rifles had been born lucky, His mother had died of influenza moments after his birth. A miracle baby who had grown up to enlist in 1939, after a series of dead end jobs. A natural sniper, whose unit had all died during the siege of Tobruk, he had been lucky to survive after being badly burned. His scars just cause for his fiancee to turn tail and run off with a Polish airman. With only a life as a cripple awaiting him back home, he volunteered from his hospital bed as the medical team had spoken doing his duty as a control subject in a secret project to beat the Nazi Science division, Hydra.

The test subjects at the hospital were kept in the dark, with no outside communications and all already listed as missing in action. The third cycle of serum had been administered to his control group the previous day. The others died within minutes and for hours he had lain in agony, as fever burned, and violent convulsions left him bloody and bruised. He'd been put in the basement designated as the morgue as the doctors had assumed he was a goner with only hours till he breathed his last. He had woken naked under a sheet, stuck under a broken slab of concrete with two other corpses keeping him company.

The tall dark haired man was grey with dust as he lay in the moonlight gasping as clean air filled his lungs. He woke again at dawn to the cold, sting of heavy summer rain baptising him. The water washed way the grime, he stood on shaky feet and started to walk to civilisation. Reborn and ten miles from the nearest village, with no papers, no money and no clothes. He did not dwell on the fact he could walk without pain for the first time in over a year. That there were no scars or wounds from the air raid that had buried him. It was a miracle that all the hurt and pain was gone.

He was no stranger to 'borrowing' what he needed on occasion, he soon had clothes, boots and a bike. The nearest town was Reading, where he could beg, borrow or steal an identity card and some cash and get the train home. He still wondered on the miracle of his reflection this morning. His skin unblemished, the prickle of stubble on his face and scalp, where there had been lumpy scarred flesh before. Jack Rider had hated the needles and the silence from the boffins. He had done his duty, to hell with secrets and the army. He had only been buried but a few inches of rubble, but there had been no attempt to look for survivors.

Jack Rider was going to live every day from now on like it was his last. In Manchester, he would get an old friend to forge identity papers, as he could clearly remember all the details of his old one. He'd do alright working the black market, keep clear of official channels, lest they arrest him for being AWOL.