Tony always believed he was a reasonable man, and so strived to meet a reasonable standard of living; even after his falling on such hard times he endeavoured to keep up a modicum of dignity in his everyday doings; he made sure to be the most methodical in his regular scrounging and appropriated his spoils with the less fortunate; whenever he was called on to tell a story around the oil drum-fire he made sure to do his best keep his new friends as entertained as possible; he also considered himself, as the oldest, tacitly responsible for their well being.

When the outbreak began (masked via the media as an errant chemical spill) he voiced the proposition that they should move as far out to the coast as possible, preferably nearby a sufficiently frequented bridge: if whatever the true problem was turned out to be especially deadly he wanted an escape route and after lengthy debate his friends agreed after a glimpse of some news footage through an electronics store window (live film of twitching, blood-coated zombies and what looked like giant skinless gorillas violently eating people has a way of swaying opinion).

Once satisfactory preparations and contingencies had been made they arduously hauled their encampment through the panic-stricken streets into a dank but functional, half-finished hovel underneath one of the pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge to wait, every so often returning to the closest electronics store to keep updated.

There was something in the air, Tony thought: the city had been the subject of significant endangerment plenty of times before and yet there was a lingering, unspoken concurrence within the homeless community that this incursion would be different... worse.

Tony's fears were confirmed and superseded: barely a dozen days after the "incident at Penn station," the infection (now broadcast as a biological terrorist attack) had taken a sizable bite out of Manhattan's population with almost sixty percent of the island's inhabitants infected (according to official polls) with people screaming for Richards and Stark to come up with a cure while both men presumably slaved away feverishly in their respective laboratories by night and tried to aid in the evacuation of uninfected civilians by day.

As things got bleaker and sixty percent moved up to sixty-five the majority of news networks repeatedly chanted the name 'Alex Mercer' over and over again, vilifying him as the sole culprit of the chaos while holding up the cities resident metahumans as great heroes struggling for the future of America (and the rest of the world too). Every so often one of their lookouts would spot Thor or the human torch etc flying laps to wherever the screaming was loudest.

The hope that sort of image gave to his friends was something Tony appreciated.

Frighteningly soon however, despite all their effort, even the metahumans were coming close to being overwhelmed; it was understandably terrifying to people that the fantastic four and the avengers combined were having trouble containing a virus (no attempt at cover-up could hide where the scales were tipping by this point).

There was a growing fear that some more potent strain would emerge out of nowhere and infect the super humans trying to help (it was a damn miracle that a hero hadn't fallen already), apparently that sentiment was shared by someone important too because both superhero teams were asked to pull back from the infected zones (with the same encouragement broadcast over the airwaves for any singular or unknown supers who might have remained unaffiliated despite the military's previous efforts at rallying them)

When the carnage came close enough for the screaming to be heard as background noise evacuation became top priority and the remainder of the population began a desperate scramble to escape Manhattan with a few remaining behind as volunteers for aid ('and as extra zombie fodder')

While most who were considered worth the effort were herded into temporary refugee camps over in Queens a few had to be left behind

'No more room' they said.

So Tony and a few others made plans with those few willing that had been similarly abandoned: the destitute, the homeless, the sick and the infirm, people who were unspokenly considered the least important or the most trouble and hadn't been able to buy their ticket out, (like Fisk)

Still, aside from a desperate holdout by S.H.I.E.L.D. on the coast the entire city was nigh on completely lost, most-all of the bridges had been bombed; all they could do was wait in the camps as they were sifted through as the marines and the 'masked guys' with them posted alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. made to find any of those able and ready to carry a gun (after being reconfirmed as uninfected of course)

Tony was never unfortunate enough to be drafted; he was quite old then, a measly bum's diet and years of steady atrophy made sure he could barely break into anything quicker than a hasty jog or lift much more than a small shopping cart's-worth of trash.

As many of his (younger) friends were separated from each other, many for the last time, there came a faint glimmer of hope: the background noise of screaming, explosions and the moans and cries of the infected, a dreadful cacophony that had become as familiar as a heartbeat began to recede ever so slightly back into the distance.

They still wouldn't answer his questions of course

Then later he found himself smiling, a contortion he'd thought the people had thoroughly lost the capacity for before he spotted iron man soaring overhead.

They were bringing the super heroes back.

That meant that something must've changed… for the better.

For a while after that first sighting nobody said a word; maybe things weren't getting better, maybe they were just so desperate they'd been forced to bring the supers back in some sort of last-ditch effort to stem the tide of the infection.

Then on the 23rd of January 2009, the horizon was bathed in the screaming light of a nuclear bomb.