Winter's Ghost
Chapter 7
Icy fingers pierced Dora's brain, pulling it apart, as it seemed, tearing her apart to find her weaknesses and skewer that one point. Beads of sweat rolled down her forehead, she felt on fire but frozen solid at the same time. She was shaking, couldn't stop trembling, whether in paranoia and terror of what was happening to her or genuinely in pain and losing control of herself.
It was the stuff in those damn crates, she was one hundred percent sure of that. It could be killing her right now, for all she knew, or transforming her into something absolutely terrible. If she did, she prayed that someone would have the decency to kill her and end it before she destroyed more humans.
Everything hurt so awfully.
Dora didn't know where she was, either it was very dark or she was still where the truck had landed, perhaps the serum had blinded her. Shit, not exactly what she'd expected. Blind? Really? Pfft…HYDRA couldn't even come up with something more exciting than that?
But no, she wasn't blind. There was a blanket on top of her and she was lying on something with padding. Someone had obviously found the scene.
Of course they had. That explosion would have been seen for miles and heard for even more. She should have gotten out of there as soon as she'd been able to wriggle out from underneath the wreck, but she knew she hadn't been able to do that then. It would have been impossible to get far, anyway, and the police would easily have been able to track her bloody footprints through the woods. Even though her head was throbbing like hell, she managed to sit up and pull the blanket off of the top of her, and looked around the dim area where she'd been placed.
It was a small room, grey walls, no other furniture but the hospital bed she'd been placed on. But this wasn't a hospital, more than likely this was the police station, and they were just waiting for experts to arrive to examine her situation. Funny, they hadn't handcuffed her to the bed. Perhaps they'd been afraid of touching her contaminated skin. Looking down at her flesh, it looked burned, discolored with blue and purple, her skin had an iridescent sheen to it. Perhaps they hadn't cleaned all of the liquid off of it, at least, that's what Dora hoped. Slipping off of the bed and onto the floor, she was barefoot and the cold cement ground felt like it was burning into the bottom of her feet. Quickly she yelped and hopped back onto the bed. There was something really wrong with her right now. But it couldn't stop her from getting away. Gritting her teeth and bracing herself for what she knew she had to do, she placed her feet on the floor, one at a time and started to walk towards the door. Every movement she made was torture, burning then freezing then burning again. Whoever had created this serum had been— awful. The door was unlocked, thankfully, and Dora did her best to quietly open it, even though the hinges were in terrible condition. Her fingers were twitching, in pain like the rest of her body. Stabbing pains in her ribs reminded her of her already bad injuries from the car crash, the rest of her ached and felt like she was carrying another body as well as her own. The hallway in front of her was empty, she shuffled like a zombie through it towards a door that said "EXIT" on it. Hopefully she'd be able to get out without setting off any alarms, and if it was really that bad, she could die on her own. She could her muffled voices coming from the front of the building, someone sounded angry, and then footsteps. Turning her attention back to the door she saw that she'd have to punch in a verification code on the dial next to it in order to get out.
Shit.
The footsteps were coming closer, she dialed in four random numbers.
5-2-9-1.
Wrong. It glowed red twice.
Clicking of heels on the floor, Dora frantically typed in four more, once again wrong. Fuck, she'd have to fight her way out of this one. With her back to the door, she balled up her fists and prepared as best as she could to fight whoever came around the corner.
He came into view and their eyes locked. Dora blinked in unbelief, letting her hands fall to her sides.
"Bucky? What— the fuck are you doing here?"
Her voice lacked emotion, it was shallow and toneless.
"I came to find you, Dora. I've been worried sick about you!" Were those tears in his eyes?
She tried to swallow, but it hurt to much, her mouth didn't feel right as she spoke.
"I couldn't stay Bucky, I was making things harder for you. I thought it would be for the best, I'm sorry. I screwed up and I'm a fucked up mess without you." Searing salt water dripped down her cheeks as she eked out the words to say. A hint of a smile was visible on his face as he rushed forward to grab her in his arms but she shrunk away and protested.
"NO! You can't touch me!"
It was his turn to be shocked.
"Dora, what do you mean, what's wrong?"
"Bucky, you can't touch me or be near me. You have to leave— right now. I'm contaminated."