10.

1988

As always, the tightness in her midsection started as soon the car drove past the bank of traffic lights five blocks away from the rotunda building.

After two years, all this should cause as much apprehension as signing her name, but here they were. She wondered if Jules felt the same way, but she probably didn't.

'I'm thinking of getting a new car,' Barbara said as she squeezed her Ford Escort into a small space in the underground car park, then managed to natter on about mileage all the way to the vault. It made it easier, the small talk. Greased the way. 'What kind of mileage does yours get?'

'Terrible. Why do you think I carpool?'

It got easier still once they both slid their keys into the slots. You could just focus on the script you had to follow. 'Dr Barbara Gerber, entry at nine forty-five a.m.,' she said to the spinning wheels of the locked recorder in one of the walls.

'Dr Juliana Garcia, confirming entry at nine forty-five a.m.'

There were hand-over procedures to go through, validation codes to enter. She said hello to Mike and Josh, who were already at their bank of monitors, and waved goodbye to Jules as she went to her usual post even deeper in the basement, where she sat surrounded by neurological data and listened to mix-tapes by English musicians who'd killed themselves.

There wasn't much chatter after that. There never was. Once the vault door slid shut it was like being inside the belly of some huge animal, a blanket of silence punctuated only by the hum of the machines.

It was the air, she was sure. It never felt right. It wasn't the smell. It was the absence of windows, she supposed, the way sound bounced off the walls. Subterranean, that was the right word. It felt exactly like it sounded.

'Just routine monitoring today, guys?' Barbara said.

'Yeah. If we're lucky,' Mike said, one eye on the screens, the other on the coils of magnetic tape he was spooling back into a cassette with the aid of a ballpoint pen.

She stepped to the back of the room to make herself a cup of coffee. Throughout the years the teams working here had assembled a collection of colourful mugs, including her Garfield one. She supposed it was to make the place feel a bit cosier, but in between the fluorescent lights, the enormous vault door, and the wall of safety deposit boxes off to one side, it felt like hanging tinsel in a morgue.

The guy sitting on a chair with a rifle at his side probably didn't help.

She swallowed. 'Hey.' She didn't know his name and she wasn't supposed to. The guys who came in from the tactical teams always did so under strict anonymity.

'Hey,' he said, not looking up from his magazine. His flak jacket didn't do much to cover up the bulges of muscles and the butt of a handgun.

And if he wanted to, he could go through the armed guard like a tank through wet tissue.

She took a big sip of her coffee. It was bad, and bitter, even with all the sugar, and it was warm rather than hot. But it was better than going into the other room with nothing.

Juliana was so lucky. She almost never had to look at him.

Captain Cool. Most of them called him Captain Cool. She went through the nicknames in her head as she began the routine of checking the cryo-tube readings. Frosty. Ice Pops. Deathsicle. Mr Freeze, like some comic book villain.

She checked temperature readings, vitals, making sure he hadn't died-died or started defrosting inside the tube. This close, she could smell the faint odour of ozone coming from the machines, and she didn't have to look at the glass window on the tube. The engines rumbled away, the only noise in the room aside from the squeak of her soles on the floor. She glanced at the brain activity readout, showing occasional bursts of alien patterns even in deep freeze. It was just noise, mostly. Jules had compared it to the snow on a TV screen tuned to static.

Once there had been a sudden spike, and Barbara had startled so hard she'd nearly fallen on her butt.

The room was cold, but she knew that wasn't what made her skin prickle with goosebumps, her kidneys feel like little ice lumps in her lower back. That was all him. Captain Cool. Only the nicknames didn't help. In the past two years she'd seen her share of things, all the stuff Captain Cool did to the team when something inside his brain misfired: cuts, bruises, black eyes, concussions. Once a grenade had ripped a hole in him and he'd still been able to give someone a shattered collarbone and a shredded spleen.

She caught a glimpse of the glass panel as she stepped away, and stopped. A chill darted down her spine.

Stupid, she told herself. You're being stupid. It was just like working with a lion, or a crocodile, or a deadly virus. An anatomy class cadaver that had been reanimated and didn't rot.

Once one of his eyes had opened inside the cryo-tube. It was normal, she knew, the eyelids could retract like that. He'd looked like he was giving the room an unblinking, accusing stare until they slid the lid shut again so the eye wouldn't be damaged.

Once a routine resus had gone wrong. Halfway through, just after he'd come out of the warming tank, his heart rate had stopped climbing, flattened, then plunged to nothing. She'd expected to panic. Instead she'd managed to adjust the dosages of her compounds that stimulated blood circulation and pacemaker cell activity while the doctor intubated him and performed chest compressions. At some point she'd heard a loud crack, and fumbled one of the needles. Later she'd smoked a furtive cigarette in the parking garage, thinking of what Mr Pierce would have said if Captain Cool—no, the asset, you had to call him the asset—had died. It was only afterwards that she realised that the noise she'd heard had been ribs cracking; he gave no signs of discomfort or pain once he was fully conscious. And even later still, she saw the ribs had healed much faster than anything human could manage. The bruising on his chest had faded in a matter of hours, like a spoonful of ink in a tub of water.

She heard the phone ring in the prep room, and by the time she got there, Josh was already putting the handset down. 'Pierce wants him ready in two hours' time.'

They had him ready in one and a half. One day, Barbara thought as she prepared the drugs that would ready his brain for conditioning, she would be doing all this on auto-pilot.

The conditioning itself was one of the easiest tasks. Captain Cool was hooked up to machines, the kind that covered his face, and those did most of the work. You didn't have to look at it at all.

When things went well.

The prep work before, she disliked.

She disliked having to touch him. It was the scent, maybe, that chemical smell from cryo and the resus still clinging to him. His skin even looked slippery. It was the mechanical arm, a robot part sewn to his flesh. Or maybe the fact that he just sat there, not moving, neither helping nor hindering, staring straight ahead without seeing, stringy hair hanging down like seaweed. Some of the hair stuck to his cheek and one of his eyes, but he didn't push it out of the way, didn't even blink. She could feel his breathing, even, like some mechanism inside a wax figure, and when she stuck the leads to his chest, she felt a flutter of his heart even through the latex gloves, and had to stop herself from shuddering.

She pulled back, sucked the paralytic into the syringe, and pushed any air bubbles out.

His right hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. She bit down a scream and almost dropped the syringe.

He was so fast she hadn't even seen his hand move.

Her lips parted, soundless. The syringe remained clutched in the fingers of her right hand, the knuckles so white she was sure she was going to crack the plastic in half. Where are the guards? The thought came from very far away. Why wasn't anyone seeing this? Her heart was thudding loud enough for everyone to notice.

He didn't hurt her. He just turned his face towards her.

It wasn't blank. For once, his face wasn't blank. Or ice-cold. It had always been ice-cold whenever she caught his eye.

Instead he just looked wrung out.

He could toss her across the room if he wanted to. Yank her to him so fast that by the time the first bullet hit his flesh or a million volts raced up the mechanical arm, he would have already snapped her neck or crushed her windpipe.

Instead he looked at her like he expected her to hurt him and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

'I. Umm,' she said.

Why are you talking to him? The thought-voice again, far-off and disdainful.

'I have to inject this.' She looked at the needle. It was better than looking at him. 'In, er, it goes in your eyes. But… it doesn't really hurt?'

You're reassuring the defrosted dead guy who kills people. A new career high point.

He released her. Her hand fell back on her hip. She could still feel the weight of him on her wrist, the cold seeping through her skin.

He stared straight ahead again, empty.

She lifted the syringe, and had to use all her strength to stop the needle from shaking.

:=:=:=:

'What should I do with you?'

Barbara tried to focus on the tray where she was preparing the drip that'd knock him out, but she couldn't help but look at Mr Pierce from under her eyelashes. He stood over him, sounding calm, a little indulgent.

'Wiped,' he said. The amount of benzos and GABA modulators he was getting in the IV drip would have knocked out a horse, but his voice was only slightly slurry. 'I need to be wiped.'

'That's right, you do.'

She looked up. Mr Pierce turned around and shook his head almost imperceptibly.

She returned the infusion bag to the tray. They weren't going to need it.

When the screams started, Mike slipped his headphones on.

:=:=:=:

Two hours after the conscious wipe, she and Jules sat at the all-night diner a few streets away from the bank. Barbara's hands shook a little when she wasn't handling the cutlery or her glass of sweet tea. Her thoughts shook too. She would like them to stop.

'Why did you join Hydra?'

She hadn't really meant to ask the question, hadn't even felt the words form on her tongue. They'd just—

like what he said to

—slipped out.

Jules stilled halfway through dipping a french fry in ketchup. 'A little louder.' Jules always sounded like a monotone ashtray, but after two years Barbara could read the note of irritation in her voice. 'I don't think that guy at the back heard you.'

'Yeah?' Barbara raised her voice a little. She knew she was being childish, but she couldn't help it. 'Hydra! Hydra! Hydra alert!' A man in a baseball cap looked vaguely in their direction as he turned a newspaper page, but none of the night owls in the diner seemed to even notice the two of them were there. 'Nobody cares.'

Jules popped the fry into her mouth. 'Fine. Nobody cares.' She was always a little grumpy after she had to review the data from a wipe. 'Three years ago I was trying to get onto a tenure-track job.' She paused to lick a spot of grease and salt off her thumb. 'You know Taylor was my PhD supervisor, right?'

Barbara nodded. If they'd been at school together, Barbara would have been the kid filling notebooks with panicked scribbles to keep up with the teacher, and Jules would have been the kid who always looked cool as a cucumber and aced every test despite never taking any notes.

'I was doing a postdoc.'

'That sounds—'

'It sucked.' Her tone was unreadable again. 'This one time I went into my department head's office while he was on the phone. He didn't look up, just told me to come empty the wastebaskets later.'

Barbara chuckled, more from the tension coiling in her shoulders since the bank than anything else, then flushed and looked down at the eggs on her plate when Jules didn't join in.

'Not too long after that I got a letter from S.H.I.E.L.D. mentioning one of my papers. It said someone as exceptional as me deserved to have her talents recognised. How's that for a recruitment pitch?' Her throaty voice played it as a joke, but the quote from the letter was too specific to have been anything but memorised. 'The letter came from S.H.I.E.L.D., but really it came from a circle. And that was it. If I have to be on a team, I'd rather be on the winning one.'

'So…' Barbara said after a little while, just to fill the empty space in the conversation. The other people in the diner weren't talking much. Most of the noise came from the clinking of cutlery and a radio somewhere in the kitchen.

'You ladies need anything?' a waitress asked them. After she'd walked away, ponytail bouncing behind her, Jules spoke again.

'How about you? How did you join?'

Barbara looked at her. Jules's face was unreadable again, and the omelette felt suddenly leaden in Barbara's stomach. Was the other woman testing her loyalty? Did she think that was what Barbara was doing? There were no second thoughts in Hydra. There was no such a thing as a lapsed member.

There were no second chances either. She had known that all along, but it had never quite seemed real.

Barbara took a gulp of her tea and cleared her throat. 'I'd been in S.H.I.E.L.D. for two years. My team leader turned out to be in a circle.'

It had been that simple.

It had been that complicated.

He'd listened to her worrying, which was something she'd done all the time back then. She'd worried about mushroom clouds, and her pension, and flint-eyed men who planted bombs, and the ozone layer, and civil wars she saw on TV, and the sex plague that had shown up during the second year of her PhD. Until then the fear had gone nowhere, just curdled in the back of her mind. Then Ben had joked about all those useless politicians up in the Hill, and then he had half-joked about there being a better way, and after a while he wasn't joking at all.

She had recoiled, at first. She'd learned the history back in high school, more or less. But Ben had explained how things really were, outside the lies on two or three pages on a schoolbook. Hydra wasn't about war, it was about peace. It wasn't about a dictatorship, it was about having a purpose. It wasn't about a master race or a master nation, it was about the people of the future, and in the future there would be no borders and no flags. The people of the future would be a universal race, bred to greatness by inheriting greatness from wherever it was to be found. The only things culled would be the weaknesses and the flaws holding us back. A new and final stage in human history.

There was a tomorrow with Hydra. There was a place you were going, a new world about to be born.

And that always meant some blood, some pain.

She understood that. She understood that there were enemies and there was only one way to deal with them. She understood there would be one last struggle, that there would have to be sacrifice.

Only—

'Do you ever… find it kinda weird?'

Well, there it was. The cat was out of the bag. No point in trying to stuff it back.

She felt almost relieved.

Jules finished another fry. 'What's weird?'

'The stuff we do to Captain Co—I mean the asset.'

She wanted to look down at her plate, but Jules's eyes were distracted. 'You mean the super-strength thing?'

'No,' Barbara said. 'It's just…'

What? What is it?

'We never get any complaints,' she finished. It was a dumb joke and they both knew it. Neither of them laughed. 'I guess it's no big deal.'

She knew it wasn't. Sure, some of the things they did to him were painful, or strange, or dangerous, but that didn't make them wrong. You couldn't explain surgery to a dog or a child either, but you still carried it out.

Only it was different when you had to see everything up close.

That was it. Thinking it made it coalesce, like one of those Magic Eye pictures once you'd looked at it enough.

You kept wondering about how real he was. How much he thought. How much he felt. What kind of things were inside his head, where Jules's data couldn't see.

'It just makes you wonder, you know?' Barbara said, punctuating it with a shrug to make it appear casual. 'He looks just like a person.'

Jules let out a little snort. 'Sure. When it happens to someone like him, now it's a tragedy.' Barbara had no idea what she meant, but she was already talking again. 'He's not a person. I don't know what kind of readings you guys get upstairs, but I see the brain data. Trust me on this.'

She didn't need to look at the brain scans to know Jules was right, didn't even need to think back to the readings she took and studied, values so off the charts new charts had been assembled to evaluate them. All she needed to do was remember bruises fading like ink in water. People lying in bed with their throats slit. Himstaring straight ahead with an empty husk look while Mr Pierce talked to him.

His hand around her wrist.

Besides, even if he were a person, so what? So what? People died at Hydra's hands. Even more would die in the final struggle. People died every day. Crossing the street. Lying in their beds. At least when they did it, it was necessary.

She thought back to Mike slipping his headphones on, staring at his screens so he didn't have to watch.

:=:=:=:

It was several months before they had to wake up the asset for a mission again.

Sometimes it felt shorter. She had her work—for S.H.I.E.L.D., or was it Hydra?—long days in the lab, longer days still doing paperwork or looking at the glow of a computer monitor. The days grew longer, then shorter again. She tried not to look at her calendar, where she'd marked her scheduled days monitoring him with little ballpoint pen stars.

Sometimes it felt longer. She would wake up from strange and sticky dreams and lie on her bed, trying to brush away the little thorn in the back of her mind by watching late-night TV. It didn't help; an old horror movie would always show up. I Walked With a Zombie. Eyes Without a Face. The Invisible Man. She would let them drone away on the TV set like white noise and stare at the ceiling, feeling the house around her settle, or perhaps moan.

She noticed all kinds of things now, like a message transmitted in a code only she could read. A display of WWII books in a shop window. Stars hung from trees. A woman on the TV called Barnes. Even a kid, once, sitting on a park bench near the Lincoln Memorial and reading an old Captain America comic. Hadn't those things gone out of print in the 60s for reason of everybody realising how much they sucked?

She wasn't stupid. She knew why she was noticing those things. His past life was a bit of an unspoken joke for everyone who put in shifts at the vault. If you weren't smart enough to figure it out on your own, you weren't smart enough to work there.

It wasn't something she'd ever thought about much.

What if it's wrong?

She thought this, instead, like a cough she couldn't shake. In the shower, in the lab looking at her cell cultures, in a traffic jam hazy with heat.

Well, it couldn't be too wrong. They all did worse things. S.H.I.E.L.D., the government. When she'd been recruited, she'd been working on something that could bury you alive in your own body, and now they were working on reviving the dead. And then there were the coups, the invasions, the secret deals. At least Hydra did what it did for the sake of the world, not just one country, or one man.

It was just seeing it that was hard. Everybody knew that. It was hard even knowing it was right.

It was right.

Wasn't it?

What if it's wrong?

'Do you understand me?' She was prepping him again. Everyone else went about their business. They hadn't heard her whisper.

He didn't glance at her, but his brow furrowed, just a little. He had heard her.

She kept going through the protocol, talking in a barely audible monotone. 'Do you… mind this? What happens here? Do you want this?'

There was no answer. He remained motionless, his face blank and slack again.

'If you want,' she said. 'I could… do something. Maybe. Change things. If it would… help.'

She turned to the trolley. When she glanced at him again, he was looking at her. Her stomach knotted up. He was no longer blank. Instead he was wearing an expression of pure, icy rage. If his stare were as deadly as the rest of him, she'd be lying bloodless on the floor.

She turned away, mumbled to the team that she needed the bathroom. Her throat was too dry. She could barely get the words out.

But he'd understood her, she thought after she splashed some water on her face. She looked at herself in the square of mirror bolted to the wall. She knew he had understood her.

'Dr Gerber.'

It was a few hours later and she was gathering up her things before she left. She nearly dropped her scarf, fumbled for it, turned around.

It was Mr Pierce.

'Sir,' she squeaked, then coughed.

He didn't look angry. He almost never did, only disappointed, sometimes, even when he was talking to him.

(One time he had talked to him behind a closed door and Barbara had heard his voice rise, but only a little, and when Mr Pierce had stepped out he had been folding a blood-spotted handkerchief.)

Right now, there was a faint smile on his lips. 'See you soon.'

'I—'

She could stop now. Say goodbye and slip on her coat and go back to where there were streets and people and the Capitol dome off in the distance, instead of linoleum and concrete walls and the smell of formaldehyde and a face under ice.

'Have you been working with the asset long, Mr Pierce?' she said instead. Inane, she knew, but there was something in the way Pierce looked at you and the way he stood that made you want to tell him things.

'Some time, yes. Why, is there anything I should know about?' His tone was casual. She would tell him everything and he would nod once in understanding, then forgive her.

'Does he… feel things?'

Wow. A real winner there.

Pierce's expression didn't change, though. It was just that his eyes remained focused on her while he crossed his arms over his chest. Did he blink? 'Do you like your post, Dr Gerber?' he said, after what felt like an eternity.

Her palms felt sweaty. 'I—I'm happy to do whatever Hydra requires of me.'

A little flicker of unhappiness in his expression. 'Do you like your post?' he repeated. He sounded like a father talking to a child who had, without warning, misbehaved.

'Sure. I mean. I don't think—'

'I think loyalty is better than blind obedience. Don't you think so, Dr Gerber?' He was calm, even a little casual. They might be having a chat over some beers.

There was a small hard stone in her throat. 'Yes.'

'I like my people to be where they fit best. So if you are unhappy with this assignment… it can be terminated.' He sounded a little regretful, but not unduly so. 'It'd be no work at all.'

She felt the nape of her neck cool. 'I enjoy my work.'

He nodded, once, seemingly to himself. 'I hope you realise the importance of what we're doing here. How much the asset matters. What we accomplish with him.'

'Of course, sir. It's—ah, it's an honour.'

The corners of his eyes crinkled a little at that. He seemed to find it amusing. 'Is it?'

'I joined Hydra because we are right,' she ended up saying, and knew straight away she'd said the wrong thing.

'Thank you, Dr Gerber,' he said after a few seconds. 'Enjoy your weekend.'

'Thank you, sir,' she muttered, and hurriedly wrapped her scarf around her neck as she turned away.

'Dr Gerber.'

She stopped. Her heart drummed away in her chest. She didn't dare turn around. 'Sir?'

'Hail Hydra.'

'Yes, sir. Hail Hydra.'

:=:=:=:

It took two weeks for her to be sure she was in serious trouble.

:=:=:=:

It wasn't until a quarter to seven that she really started wondering if someone was following her, but by five o'clock she had already grown nervous enough to feel queasy, and by six she had to keep walking around the exhibit to stop herself from fidgeting.

She hadn't been nervous when she'd sent that electronic memo to Director Fury. She had just typed it, her fingers moving while she did little more than watch. She'd finished it, sent it through the secure network, then stared at the computer terminal until the screensaver—now in colour, for added entertainment value—showed up.

Her nerves fizzled. She started another circuit around the exhibit hall and stopped to take a sip at one of the water fountains. She had asked the Director to meet her at the Captain America exhibit in the Smithsonian at 6:30pm and it was now twenty past six. He wasn't going to show up. How many messages did Director Fury get, all proclaiming they had something important to discuss with him? How many messages did he get a day? Dozens? Hundreds? Had he even read it at all? His secretary had probably printed it out and it was still sitting in the middle of a two-inch-thick pile.

He was going to show up. He was going to stare at her, even with the eye behind the patch, and she would forget all about the little cover story she had rehearsed and which was growing flimsier and flimsier by the minute, and the word Hydra would crawl out of her lips. No, that wouldn't be necessary. He would read it in her thoughts. Then she would be whisked off to a detention facility in an undisclosed location.

Maybe they would let her see sunlight, once in a while.

Maybe he was Hydra himself.

No sunlight.

She had seen that man in the grey shirt before, the one pretending to read one of the posters.

(She had seen plenty of recurring faces in the past two weeks, she was sure. Strange clicks in her phone line.)

No, his shirt was blue. It was a different guy. She was just being stupid.

But as closing time approached, the crowd, not big to start with, was growing thinner and thinner. Soon she would be out in the open. Why had she picked this, of all places?

She glanced at the mural out of the corner of her eye. She could see—

he's looking at me

—his face. He'd had one, before, not just wax-figure flesh. A name. She had known all that going in, and for two years it had made no difference, but maybe now it would stop her from bolting. Just like those dates engraved on a plaque, 1917-1945. Her gaze drifted towards them.

Her blood turned to ice.

The man in the grey shirt was standing a little out of sight, but it was him. She slipped her hands into her coat's pockets and started to walk. Her legs felt like jelly at first, but soon she had to stop herself from breaking into a run. She zig-zagged across the museum, up and down flights of stairs, and finally made it out and to the place where she'd parked her car, hoping it had been enough to shake him. She fumbled with her keys, managed to get in, and took several breaths before she started the car and pulled out of her parking spot.

The sun had already begun to set, but there was still enough light for her to see the black car pulling out at the same time, a few spots behind her.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. She forced herself to look at the tarmac in front of her car until the strain in her temples was too much, then let herself glance at the rearview mirror. There was no black car. The cars behind her drifted in and out of other streets, unaware and uncaring. Nobody was following her.

And the car had been midnight blue, not black.

It hadn't even pulled out at the same time as she had, she'd just mixed the two things together in her mind.

Even so she took the most complicated route possible back to her house, full of loops and detours. When she arrived it was two hours later, full dark. One of her neighbours had already put a witch doll outside, above the pumpkins. In the gloomy light of the street lamps, it looked like a hanged body.

She waited for a few moments in the safety of the garage before she stepped inside the house. Nothing bad could happen to you in a room that smelled a little of motor oil and where she'd piled up her old college textbooks and scuba equipment she'd only used once.

The first thing she heard when she stepped inside the house was a voice. Her bladder was suddenly cold and hot inside her, until she realised it was only the droning of the downstairs TV set. She had forgotten to turn it off that morning. She switched it off now, halfway through a traffic report, and stared for a few seconds at the dark shape of her reflection on the screen before she examined every room. Everything was as she left it, she was sure. Doors locked, windows bolted. She closed all the curtains, opened the closets, even peered under the bed. Someone had slipped a bunch of leaflets through the mail slot on the front door and they were lying on the rug below it. That was reassuring, just a little: you couldn't be too scared when you were looking at junk mail.

Calm down.

She went into her living room and opened the curtains a fraction so she could peer out.

The black car was back.

It was parked on the other side of the street, in the shadowy spot between two street lamps. She was sure she could even see the driver, a more solid shade, staring at her.

It's a different car.

Since when was she an expert on cars? She let the curtains drop shut again. There was no driver, that had just been her imagination, but she hadn't imagined the car. She backed away into the kitchen, eyes on the window as though the driver might burst in at any moment, then grabbed the phone and pressed 9.

Her finger hovered above the 1.

God, this is stupid.

She slammed the handset back on its cradle on the wall.

What was she going to tell the police?

A week after she had joined Hydra, she had received an envelope containing her two outstanding parking tickets, now cancelled, and a note saying only you're welcome.

(Those clicking sounds on the line.)

The lights went out.

She tried both light switches. Nothing, of course, but she'd already known that.

She wasn't scared. She just felt very cold. The curtains in the kitchen windows were almost sheer, so she could see enough to open the drawer where she kept a flashlight. She flicked the switch on, off, on again. Nothing.

The batteries were dead.

She glanced at the backyard, just a tangle of—

someone watching

—shadows, and grabbed the phone again.

There was no dial tone when she pressed the handset to her ear. The line was dead.

The car.

If she made it to the garage, she could bolt the door behind her and maybe have enough time to drive away. She went out into the corridor, where it was full dark and she had to guide herself by touch. It was her house. She knew it. She'd walked into the garage so often she could do it in her sleep…

A creak. She froze. Her lips parted. It's only the house. It's only the house. But it wasn't. An animal terror gripped her.

There was something in the corridor with her.

She could sense it, making her skin ripple with goosebumps and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

She ran. No thought now. She bumped into walls, cracked her knee on a side table. No car, no garage. Her body was in charge now, pulling her to where it felt safe. Behind the sofa, maybe, under the covers.

The shape was waiting for her on the stairs. She tried to turn around, lost her footing, and hit the wall, then the steps.

'Please.'

He grabbed her hair and yanked her up, his grip a steel trap pulling on her scalp. She didn't feel any pain.

'Don't—don't do—' She kicked at him, but there was no point. One of her shoes landed on the floor below with a soft thud. This close she could see the black hollow where his face should be. 'I tried to help you! I tried to—'

His grip slackened a little and she tried to squirm away, but it was too late, it had always been too late. She hadn't been sure if he was a person or a machine.

It had never occurred to her that she was wrong about both and he was a monster.

She tried to scream, but she didn't even have time to get a whimper out before his metal hand covered her face and a hot rain of blood gushed from her slashed throat.

TBC…

Author's note: More meta teal deering ahead, once again feel free to skip: without getting too boring and self-involved here, like Garcia, I am a brown woman in the sciences. Also, I am Jewish, a lesbian, and have significant disabilities, which means I am, like, one identical twin away from winning the Nonconsensual Human Experimentation Bingo (I hear the prizes are really terrible, though). So pretty much everything in this chapter is Relevant to My Interests. Also, also, that bit about Hydra's racial ideology? I didn't make it up, this was actually a part of the RL fascist ideology quite a few of my relatives had to live under at some point, only with added eugenics. We know Hydra isn't whites-only in either the MCU or the comics (hence Pierce wondering about recruiting Nick Fury back in chapter 7), but as it turns out fascism is pretty elastic and can mould its intrinsic racism into all kinds of different shapes depending on social context. Also, also, also, CA:TWS's political commentary is really much cleverer and on-point than you'd really expect from a super-hero movie, or indeed any kind of mainstream movie tbh, so there's really a lot I tried to engage with and pack into this chapter. I won't bore you with it, and I assume I'd drown in pretentiousness and dweebery if I were to link to Umberto Eco's Ur Fascism essay. (Haha, just kidding, of course the real reason I'm not linking to it is because it's a pdf. ;) But you can easily google it.) So let's just say that just like one can smile and be charismatic and popular and actually be a Horrible Nightmare of a Human Being, one can also be a not wholly unsympathetic awkward nerd and be a willing member of a fascist organisation. Unfortunately, there's no twirling moustaches (or even felt goatees) to tip you off… /tl;dr On a lighter note, I also crammed more horror movie references into this chapter than I can possibly count. And yes, the last scene is set around Halloween…

On an actually lighter note, I feel compelled to explain the thing with the cassette and the pen for those of you who didn't live through the 80s: back in the Mesozoic, when music (before we killed it with home taping, of course) came in audio cassettes, sometimes the cassette would vomit these big tangles of magnetic tape. So we'd stick a pencil or a pen, basically anything that could get enough traction, in one of the holes in the middle of those plastic reels holding the tape, and carefully turn it until the tape was back in the cassette. And hopefully there weren't any tears in the tape and you'd managed to smooth out any kinks, at least enough to wonder why you were listening to Flock of Seagulls in the first place. Those were dark times.