Day 9- Bad Boys!AU/Walking Dead Crossover Bucky/Darcy Rated M
Day 9
Bad Boys AU- Walking Dead Crossover
Bucky/Darcy
Rated M
When it came to the end of the world and life as Darcy knew it, she would always blame pop tarts for the worst of everything that happened to her.
She’d been traveling with Jane all over the world to speaking engagements, scientific conventions, and research consultations. If she’d been with Jane when the shit started to hit the fan, well, let’s just say that things would have turned out much differently
Berlin, Germany July 2nd, 2015
Dr. Foster had been doing a series of guest lectures at Humboldt-University in Berlin when she got a craving for her favorite breakfast pastry. Since the only place to get them was an American food shop in the south part of the city, so Darcy hopped in a taxi and began a journey that would take much longer than the 45 minutes she had told Jane it would take.
After making her purchase, she hopped back in the cab and started heading back into the center of the city where the university and their hotel were located. Only, about 3 minutes into the return trip, Darcy started to notice some really weird things. Things like people running and screaming down the sidewalk, being chased by other people. Things like people with blood on their clothes and hands walking into the street to get hit by oncoming traffic. Things like law enforcement shutting down the major roadways and turning people back the way they’d come.
“Sorry, Fräulein, I can’t do anything about the Polizei,” her cab driver Hans said, after they were forced to do a U-turn and follow B96 the other way.
She called Jane.
Jane told her the University was being evacuated due to some kind of riot breaking out in the city center and that she was going to call the Shield guys to go collect Darcy and keep her safe until things quieted down.
Only thing didn’t quiet down. They got worse.
She met up with Agents Green and Palmersheim and said Auf Wiedersehen to Hans.
Two hours later Jane called Darcy.
Jane told her that it wasn’t a riot, that there was some kind of contagious outbreak and that they needed to get back to the States before quarantine was declared and all travel was restricted. Apparently, Heimdall had alerted Thor that Jane was in danger and tall, cut and godly was back on Midgard and coming to fetch Jane and take her to the new Avenger’s facility in upstate New York. Darcy would have to take an airplane.
The Shield guys had apparently received orders to that effect as well because they shuffled Darcy into a black VW Touareg and took off for the airport.
It turned out that commercial flights were a joke. Every flight was booked and delayed or simply cancelled.
Darcy had almost started to panic when she’d seen the avalanche of people trying to rush the customer service desks of each and every airline. By some small miracle, Agent Green got on the phone and found her a seat on a private jet flying from Berlin to Washington D.C. carrying a bunch of U.S. Diplomats and their families. It was going to be a bit crowded, but they had room for one more if they could get her there in less than 15 minutes.
They pulled up just as the fuel guy was screwing the cap back on under the wing. She waved goodbye to the German agents and wished them luck.
The last thing she saw as the plane started to taxi out to the runway was Green and Palmersheim pulling their weapons as a dozen bloody and shambling figures appeared around the corner of the hanger.
She’d never find out if they made it out.
As bad as things were in Germany, they got worse for Darcy when they landed. Everyone on the plane was detained and shoved into hastily erected quarantine tents where they were poked and prodded and scanned for hours before being locked away in the basement of the nearest government facility. She, ironically enough, spent her Independence Day under incarceration.
Suffice it to say, she wasn’t feeling very patriotic, at all.
Upstate New York, The New Avenger’s Training Facility- July 27, 2015
Darcy watched the zombies doing their two-step spin on the giant green lawn of the fenced off property. The entirety of her mental fortitude was being exercised to keep her from screaming in frustrations and disappointment and attracting the attention of the walkers that had obviously overrun the large compound.
It had taken her weeks of pure hell, seeing and doing things that made her sick to her stomach, losing companions and friends, and shooting, stabbing, beheading and bludgeoning more rotting corpses than she could count. Not to mention the 500 odd miles she’d had to walk, hitchhike, or bike.
Now that she had made it, she made the unpleasant discovery that all the people at the facility were either dead or gone.
Jane wasn’t here. Thor wasn’t here. Shield and the Avengers’ weren’t here anymore either.
“Fuck,” she cursed quietly, and then sunk down against the trunk of large tree to have a nice silent cry and then figure out what in the world she was going to do next.
An hour and half later she had an idea. It was a bad idea, granted, but she wasn’t sure there was such a thing as a great idea left in the world.
As soon as it was dark, she found a single walker shambling around in the woods, lopped off its head with the machete she’d grabbed at a sporting goods store just outside of Scranton, New Jersey, and rubbed down her coveralls in zombie guts.
Apparently, there was still some power at the facility because the motion activated spotlights came on over by the East fence boarder as soon as the sun was all the way down. She found a road leading to a lift gate just outside the patch of light and ducked under the yellow and black stripped bar and did her best walker impression as she made her way towards the building.
She managed to find her way inside avoiding most of the zombies in the yard and began looking for any clues as to where any survivors might be headed. She nearly tripped on one of the creepers whose legs no longer worked and let out a shrill shriek as it started snapping at her ankles with its half rotted teeth. She kicked at it with her steel-toed boots until its jaw came unhinged and skittered across the floor.
When she was back on her feet she looked around and realized her shout had drawn a group from the administrative offices down the hall. She found a door that read “Stairs” and yanked it open. Darcy carefully checked the stairwell and then stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The sounds of moaning from the other side were familiar, but no less unsettling.
She looked up, then down, and decided having to jump out a window was preferable to being trapped underground and went up.
Eventually, she found the armory, still mostly stocked, which didn’t bode well for the facilities previous occupants, and took the time to gear up. She grabbed knives and ammo and a couple of extra guns and stuffed them into a large duffle bag she found tucked in one of the staff lockers. Knowing that carrying any more than that would limit her mobility too much, she, regretfully left most of the weapons behind. On her way out the door she turned back, one last time, and grabbed a grenade from a box in the corner.
You never knew…
She performed a quick search of as much of the facility as she could access while avoiding any large groups of undead. She didn’t know if she was hoping for a message painted on the wall, or an audio clip playing on a loop announcing where the group of soldiers and super heroes had intended to fall back to when they were overrun by Zeds, but if there was anything to find, she wasn’t finding it.
Turning around and navigating her way back through the maze of corridors and training rooms, she had to admit defeat.
In the front atrium she ran into a snag. When she’d screamed earlier, it had been loud enough to draw the attention of every walker in the place. The room below was packed and the four-story windows were rattling as the walkers from outside tried to get it and join the party.
“Fuck,” she hissed and ducked behind railing of the third floor walkway. Her eau de zombie camouflage had pretty much dried out and was rapidly losing its effectiveness. She was suddenly wishing she’d grabbed more grenades.
She was just starting to really loose her cool and hyperventilate when the window across from her exploded in a shower of glass shards. She flinched and ducked down again, to take cover. A few seconds later the crack of the gunshot reached her and she crawled on her stomach into the closest room and ducked behind the wall.
“What, a zombie mosh pit wasn’t enough?” She muttered as she stood and tried to peek around the wall to get a peek, “I gotta have someone shooting at me, too?”
It wasn’t the first time she’d been shot at since the world went to hell, and, if she survived, she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the last, but somehow this just felt massively unfair. Talk about worst day ever.
She couldn’t see anything. The emergency lights on the inside of the building didn’t do much besides throw a massive glare on the windows. The strip of empty pane was not much more than a line of black that opened out into more black.
Well, there weren’t too many zombies on the second floor. She could probably just hunker down and hope things would be cleared out in the morning. Then at least she’d be able to see the extent of her inevitable doom.
She heard a strange whistling/whipping sound above the grunts and groans drifting up from below and then a heavy thunk as something stuck the wall above her doorway. “Fuck!” she yelled once more and huddled against the wall.
Somehow she managed to keep from pissing herself, (it was probably the constant dehydration… at least all this suffering was good for something, right? Total silver lining), and tried to get her breathing and heart-rate down to a non-life threatening level.
When she looked again, she made a rather flabbergasting discovery.
A big ass metal harpoon thing was buried in the wall and attached to it was what appeared to be a zip line that ran well over the heads of the hoard below and out into the darkness. And possibly to safety. Or maybe not. There was really no way for Darcy to tell.
It appeared as though there was someone out there trying to help her out.
Her heart leaped in her chest as she considered that it might be the very people she was looking for. The thought galvanized her into action. She made sure the strap of the duffle bag was secure over her shoulder and across her chest and then she unbuckled her belt and stripped it off. She tossed one end over the zip line and then looped both ends securely around her hands. Pulling herself up, she perched on the railing and looked at the mass of bodies writing in the dark below.
She didn’t know if her belt or the zip line was going to hold her weight, she didn’t know what was awaiting her out in the dark. What she did know was that this was probably going to hurt like hell, and that she couldn’t stay here.
Besides, what did she have to lose? It was the fucking apocalypse for fuck’s sake.
She pushed off.
The pain in her hands and shoulders was immediate and only continued to grow with every second that she flew down the glossy nylon rope. The angle wasn’t steep enough for her to go really fast, but she found herself moving fast enough to take her breath away. Which was probably a good thing, because otherwise she might have been screaming at the top of her lungs, and that only would have drawn the attention of the walkers.
Once she had passed through the empty window frame the warm night air whipped her hair viciously around her face and into her eyes. She couldn’t see where the zip line ended, yet, but she was could tell she was past the majority of the walkers grouped up outside.
She counted to three and then released the belt from her left hand. She hit the ground with a grunt and bent her knees and rolled. The impact of the duffle bag across her back in ribs ensured that every inch of her body was screaming in agony.
Something in her left ankle was pulsing, but the sound of approaching moans told her it was time to go. She hugged the bag to her chest and took off towards the fence. When she reached the fence she ran along it until she found the gate and then ducked under and bar and limped towards the tree line.
She wasn’t moving very quickly, with the bad leg and the heavy cargo, and she could hear the sound of walkers in the dark all around her, drawn by the gunshot no doubt, moving towards the compound. She didn’t stop to look around, just kept moving forward. She had to put some distance between her and the wave of walkers she knew was on its way.
She hit a branch in the dark and her body snapped sideways. When she tripped over a fallen log and hit the ground again, the heavy bag bashing into her stomach this time, she decided to head back to the road. There might be more walkers that way, but running through the forest in the dark was tantamount to suicide.
Her chest was straining for air and the blood was pumping through her ears. Her world narrowed down to the sound of each breath and the beat of her heart. Her eyes were scanning quickly back and forth between the ground in at her feet and the space immediately in front of her.
She should have heard the roar of the engine, but in her near panicked flight, the sound simply didn’t registered.
She burst out from the trees and brush and onto the road just in time for the BMW motorcycle’s side view mirror to clip her upper arm. The force of it spun her in a circle and knocked her flat on her ass. She curled around the bag and clutched her arm. She hadn’t been moving very fast, and the bike hadn’t been going that fast, but fuck if it didn't still hurt like a son of a bitch. She whimpered another, “fuck,” and decided it was a perfect time to roll over and die.
“That’s it,” Darcy groaned as she pushed the bag of weapons away from her. “Put a fork in me, I’m done.”
“It would be a shame for you to give up now,” a deep masculine voice said from above her, “after all I’ve done to pull your ass out of the fire.”
She scowled and looked up into the face of her rescuer/guy who had hit her with his bike. “You mean like running me over? Thanks for that.” In the dark she couldn’t see much more than an outline of a silhouette and a gleam of metal.
She groaned and rolled over, trying to get to her knees. A hand appeared in front of her face. She stared at it a moment and then up into his face. Deadpan serious she asked, “Is this the part where I come with you if I want to live?”
“More or less,” he agreed and she could see the hint of a curve at the corner of his lips. “You’re looking for the Avengers, right?”
“You know where they are?” she asked, hopeful.
“No,” he admitted, “but two heads are better than one, right?”
She finally got to her feet and swung the bag strap over her head and let it fall to the ground. “You just want to play with my bag of goodies,” she said with a pout.
His mouth twitched again as he shook his head. “I have my own toys to play with,” he said, gesturing to the BMW R 1200 GS Adventure, a large pair of saddlebags slung over the back. “It’s up to you. I’m looking for Captain America. You look like maybe you could handle yourself, so if you’re going my way, I’m offering you a ride.”
She studied his face for a few moments before the sounds of walkers drifted to them on the breeze.
“Fuck it,” she sighed and lifted the bag to slam it against his chest. “Can I drive?”
“No,” he growled and followed her over to his bike. “And don’t touch my stuff.”
“Well, fuck you, too, asshole,” she actually laughed as she stood next to the bike, petting the seat appreciatively. “I’m Darcy, by the way." She offered her hand, but he ignored it as he strapped her stuff to the back.
That finished, he climbed on and then held a hand out to her. “Let’s go,” he growled. “They’re getting closer.”
“You got a name?” she asked as she hopped on behind him and wrapped an arm around his waist. “Or should I just continue to call you asshole?”
The engine roared to life and he released the kickstand just as a trio of rotting zed’s stumbled out of the trees. He gunned the engine and the tires squealed on the pavement as the bike lurched ahead.
Darcy’s arms tightened around his stomach as the momentum threatened her balance. “Asshole it is, then,” she said against his back as he took off.
“You can call me Barnes,” he said after a few minutes. The majority of the hoard where behind them now and they could breathe a little easier. He slowed their pace some and she was able to relax her grip on him a bit. She let her hand slide under his leather jacket and pressed it against his abs.
“Well, Barnes, I’d say my luck is looking up.” She laid her ear against his back and tried to relax. She didn’t feel safe, not at all, but she did feel better, and she was glad not to be alone. “I always knew I’d fall for a guy with a motorcycle. Just never figured it would be because he’d hit me with it.”
There was a small vibration through his chest as he chuckled, and Darcy smiled, as the last of the total hopelessness melted away.