Cruel Vengeance

[Classified Location], Russia

June 2011

He woke to a world of pain.

His extremities burned. It took him a moment to understand that this was because his entire body was brutally, dangerously cold.

There was ice pinning him in place, surrounding his arms and legs and torso and lips. He became aware of the intrusion of tubes that sat in his mouth and ran down his throat and understood that they were keeping him alive in some way.

His muscles strained against the ice.

For too long, there was no change.

Eventually, he felt a crack. Excitement coursed through his veins with his sluggish blood. Adrenaline entered his system and kick-started his metabolism a bit. Violent shivers wracked his body and he shoved again and again at his icy prison.

There was another crack, and another.

With a crash, his left arm came free.

He lifted it before his face, aware that this was a cybernetic arm: the sensory input was muted, limited, but still sensitive enough to run his metal fingers over the ice covering his face. And strong enough to dig in and peel the ice away.

His eyelids were frozen to his cheeks, but he kept tearing and peeling until raw, cold skin hit the air of the chamber. It couldn’t have been much above freezing but it felt like an open flame after so long in the ice. He welcomed the pain.

He gripped the tubes, braced himself, and ripped them out.

They tore his throat and stomach on the way out. The coppery taste of blood flooded his mouth, but he swallowed it down and took his first independent breath in…

He couldn’t remember.

That was concerning. To say the least.

But a concern for later.

Lashes tore out when he forced his eyes open.

He was in a room lined with melting ice. Not large. Empty. Four other unused cryo tubes stood along this wall—he could turn his head enough to see that much, though his hair and much of his mobility were still pinned in the ice.

As the room warmed, slowly, and the ice melted, he slammed his left arm again and again against the column of ice containing his legs. Cracks raced up and down until it shattered in an explosion of gleaming shards.

He turned his attention to his other arm, the normal one, and strained it against its prison until it, too, came free. His clothing—he seemed to remember that he wore a simple hospital gown and nothing else—was reluctant to come free of the ice, but he pulled away, and then all that was left was his hair.

That was harder.

He wanted to simply hack it off, but there were no blades in sight and his reach was severely limited anyway, so he carefully worked all his fingers (metal and flesh) through his hair and the ice, freeing it bit by bit.

When at last he came free,  his head was crowned by a mess of ice chunks frozen into his hair. Brown hair.

He realized he didn’t remember precisely what he looked like.

Free of the ice, he stumbled forward on clumsy limbs. He strained his mind.

“Soldier. Ready to comply?”

He shivered.

That was when the word on the wall caught his attention.

Zima. A word in a language he knew… but that wasn’t his first. Wasn’t the language of his thoughts. It corresponded with the word in his native language of winter, or in many others: hiver, invierno, baridi, dimër, vinter—

“Soldat Zima.” Winter Soldier.

Him.

“Zima,” said a woman’s voice in his mind. He frowned. Odd. He was… a soldier. That was familiar. But more than a common soldier. He belonged to the man in the gray suit, and before him, the old man with the medals. He was their weapon. Their iron fist.

He remembered hearing, in the language written on the wall, “He is the iron fist of our nation, and she is the velvet glove that covers it.”

She.

“Zima. Moy soldat.”

She was the one who called him Zima.

A face. There was a face in his mind. Red-headed, smirking, bloody, lips swollen—and in the memory, so were his own.

Stumbling, he made his way to the wall and fell to his knees at the base of the arrow drawn in ink. There was a glass slate on the floor—no, not all glass, that was just the screen. An unfamiliar piece of technology. How long had he been frozen? Cracks raced across its surface. There was a bullet hole in one corner.

He examined it for a few moments, then pressed a round depressed button near one edge.

The screen instantly lit up. He flinched at the clarity and brightness of the display. The device was thin as a wafer and light in his hands. He moved carefully, slowly.

Experimentation with the other buttons around the sides informed him that one of them turned the display off, two of them controlled the volume, and the round one could do nothing but wake up the display. If the device was meant to convey a message, it was doing poorly.

Or perhaps he wasn’t using it properly.

After a few moments’ thought, he tapped the display with one finger.

The image—an abstraction of a pond, and a digital time display—jolted.

Hm.

He swiped his finger from right to left.

The numbers of the digital clock display moved, but as soon as he moved his hand away, they snapped back into place. Swiping from the top down did nothing. Swiping from left to right swept the clock away and revealed a dark image. Blurred. But there was the shape of a person on it.

He tapped the screen once, experimentally.

Symbols appeared along the bottom. Play, pause, left and right arrows. He hesitated, then pressed ‘play’.

Shuffling sounds emanated from the device. The image jostled, then settled, and the darkness lifted bit by bit.

His breath caught. It was the woman. Face unbloody, this time—pale and fierce and sad. “Zima,” she said.

“Hello?”

There was no response. It was a recording. “My Soldier,” she continued in the language he suddenly knew was called Russian. “I do not know if you remember me.”

How could I forget? He sank down against the wall, cradling the tablet in his powerful mismatched hands, drinking in every word and gesture. Her voice knocked stones loose in his mind, one after another, an avalanche of memory.

He was Zima, her Soldier, her Soldat, her partner and lover. She was his Black Widow, the stiletto blade to his sword, his Spider, his Pauk, his partner and lover.

“We were separated,” she said, and he tensed all over.

He remembered now. Staring up at the viewing window, knowing she was behind it. Both of them unable to act. Then the words began to work their terrible magic and his mind slipped away

piece

by

piece.

There was a rage growing inside him, cold and lethal, but he listened to her message. A smile twitched his lips when she told him she was chasing vengeance. Of course. His Spider, his Pauk—she wasn’t one to weep over his prostrate body.

Zima. I am Zima. The Winter Soldier.

But even that didn’t feel quite right, and he seemed to remember that that feeling of wrongness had plagued him for years. Only with his Spider, the woman—Natalia—had the wrongness faded, and even then, not completely.

He resolved that he wouldn’t ignore it this time.

He still had to find her first.

Zima went to the control panel on the wall. This was familiar technology and he navigated it with ease, comforted by the knowledge that not long ago, Natalia’s fingers had gone through the same motions.

She’d left the things he needed easy to access. Date, location, time. Travel would be difficult. He was wearing nothing but a hospital gown, he was coated with ice, and he would need food and water and exercise to bring his body back up to minimum functionality for a fight.

First things first: warmer clothes.

Shaking the remnants of the ice from his hair, Zima took the tablet with him and left the cryochamber.

Dull memories flickered, and he navigated with ease through the bunker. He had spent several years here, before they froze him.

He passed guard after guard. All of them dead in a way that suggested a great skill and a greater rage on the part of the killer. It made him smile as he collected undamaged clothing and weaponry from the bodies. His Spider had only grown better at their work in the time he’d been gone.

He couldn’t bring himself to feel pity for the dead. They had kept him here. Kept him locked up, dull—

Memory of the pain inflicted upon him during their “treatments” made him flinch.

He filed that memory away to process later and found his way to the guards’ mess hall.

More corpses littered the floor here. His eyes flicked from one to the next, picking out the pattern: someone opens the doors, opens fire with an assault rifle, dives behind that column for cover, takes off the rest in potshots. He shook his head. Against his Pauk, they’d never had a chance.

The food was congealing in the trays, but it was by no means inedible. Zima skipped the plates, grabbed a plastic tray larger than a hubcap, and piled it with as much food as would fit. He wasn’t hungry, per se, but however many years of cryostorage had left him craving actual food.

He ate until his stomach was full, packed everything that would last a day or two into his backpack, and set off for the surface levels.

That was where they kept the helicopters.

Zima stared at the city.

It was the same, yet so different. There was the Kremlin, and the wall, and the river, and the old steeple where there used to be a cross—he’d seen pictures of the pre-USSR Russia. But the skyline was so altered; the sprawl of the city was larger… In the wake of the USSR, Moscow had become an industrialized modern city.

He ignored the voices that hailed him over the helicopter’s radio and set the craft down with some difficulty in a park in the suburbs. It was dark, and he didn’t think he was observed, but just in case, he slipped out and bear crawled along the ground until he hit an alley between ugly little houses. Then he turned around and pressed the timer. In the guts of the helicopter, he knew, the self-destruct sequence was beginning its countdown. He’d set it to half an hour. Plenty of time to get far away from here.

Luckily, the language was more or less the same. Zima eavesdropped on a few commuters on the rattly, shaky underground train system (it made his heart clench every few seconds; he didn’t think he liked modern transportation) and adjusted his diction patterns to match. It wasn’t particularly difficult to imitate the modern accent, although the slang would probably take longer.

Everywhere he looked was overwhelming.

The fashions. The vehicles. The advertisements. The behaviors. The buildings. The televisions and screens and winking technologies that he neither recognized nor understood.

Zima closed his eyes and leaned back on the hard plastic subway seat.

He trusted his senses; he’d be alerted if anything suspicious happened, or if someone attacked him. And he needed the time.

His mind could rest, and he could concentrate on calming his rage.

He still didn’t remember everything clearly, but he knew that Natalia, his Spider, was his love, and the people he still thought of as master had torn them apart.

Zima’s fingers, in his pocket, curled around a switchblade.

The subway ground to a halt.

He was the first one off and moved swiftly up the stairs to the street level. Even the tainted air of the city aboveground was better than the subway, and also better than he remembered.

Downtown Moscow.

Lights and colors and sounds assaulted Zima’s mind. He blinked and flinched and squinted around. It was nighttime, but the city didn’t seem to be gearing down for sleep in the slightest.

He realized his hands were shaking.

Adapt, then act.

He clenched his fists and focused on the address he needed to find. There would be time later to adjust to this modern world and its changes.

Zima went up to a vendor selling sausages and asked him directions.

The building was a glittering high-rise.

Zima frowned and checked the address again.

It was the right building. He sighed, registered the floor number, and stepped into the building.

It was… a hotel. And there was some kind of music drifting his direction.

Zima sighed and looked down at his ruthlessly plain, black clothes. Nothing about his attire suggested that he could wear it to a party.

Repairman guise again, then.

Zima returned fifteen minutes later carrying a plastic bin weighed down with water jugs. He approached the front desk with an affable smile. “Hello,” he said. “I’m here to fix the plumbing?”

“Ah… one moment,” the receptionist said, casting aside her phone. She tapped away at the computer and frowned. “I don’t see any recent calls for a plumber…”

“It was an emergency call-out,” Zima said. “Something about a problem on the bathrooms for that party? I think they need me soon, but if there’s no notification—”

The receptionist blanched. “Wh—the Musket Dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me,” the receptionist said.

Well, shit. Zima didn’t want to have to kill her if she insisted on coming all the way up there.

“We have restrooms for the party here,” the receptionist said, and stopped by a door. “Half the Ministers are here. If there’s a problem with the bathrooms, we could end up shut down. Some of them are temperamental.”

“Don’t we all know it,” Zima said with a grin.

The receptionist smiled back at him. “Here.” She unlocked the door. “Service hallway. It’ll put you out in the walkway where the bathrooms are. Thanks so much for coming out on short notice.”

“No problem,” Zima said. “I can grab some vodka on the way out, maybe.”

The receptionist laughed. “I’ve got a bottle behind the desk,” she said conspiratorially. “If you’re interested.”

Zima winked. “I might just take you up on that.”

She gave him a little wave and walked away.

Zima set off down the service hallway.

The bathrooms were easy to find. He promptly broke the lock off a cleaning cabinet, filled his utility case with cleaning supplies, and stuffed it in at the bottom of the shelves with some buckets and bottles in front. The jugs of water went on the top shelf behind stacks of rags.

Satisfied that his props were firmly hidden, Zima checked that the hallway was empty and ducked into the men’s room.

It was fifteen minutes before a guest of the right size came in alone.

Zima leaped out from behind a potted plant and nailed a pressure point in his neck. The man went down hard, and Zima dragged him into a bathroom cubicle.

Five minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom, the naked guest stuffed up into the ceiling, dressed in a sharp British-made suit and feeling very proud of himself. His hair was slicked back with water from the sink and he’d shaved his scraggly facial hair with the edge of a knife. Unfortunately, Zima’d had to leave much of his arsenal behind. He still had knives strapped to his hips, a pistol on each ankle, and another in an armpit holster, and his hands were covered in plain black gloves.

It would be good enough.

Zima walked out of the bathroom and into the ballroom.

He felt horribly conspicuous with his hair unstyled and his suit unfitted, but it was late, and the majority of the guests seemed too drunk to notice.

Zima got a drink, took up a post on the corner of the room, and watched.

This was part of his training. It was half instinct and half memory to analyze the movement patterns, to figure out who had power and who wanted it and who was just there for the drinks and the good time, who was drunk and who was half sober and who—

There.

Those were the people he needed. The wary kind, the watching kind, the dead-sober waiting-for-their-time-to-move kind. Predators. Like him, like his Spider.

Except no one ever saw Zima or Natalia. They were the apex predators in any given room.

Zima saw the last sober man in the room glance around once nervously and then duck out, heading for a side hall. He grinned, tossed back the last of his Scotch, and followed.

The man led Zima straight to a conference room, one floor above. He slipped inside and the door closed behind him.

Seconds later, he heard something thunk against the door, and then a groan.

It was a quiet sound, and it could’ve had any number of causes. But Zima had spent enough time causing and experiencing pain to be intimately familiar with the sounds it elicited from people. He took two steps forward and yanked open the door.

The soundproof barrier was breached. A scream and a body spilled out.

Zima threw himself inside and into a roll as a silenced bullet spat through the door frame and embedded in the wall across the hall. He came up in a half-crouch and took in the scene.

Fifteen people standing. Seven on the ground. And there, by the window, was his Pauk.

Zima’s vision tunneled.

A man raised a gun in slow motion.

Zima threw a knife sidearm without looking away from her. It landed in the man’s throat and he fell to the ground, gasping.

In that moment, Zima didn’t care who stood between himself and his Natalia.

Her eyes found his.

Zima’s instincts took over.

He and Natalia dove into motion at the same time. Even as Zima dodged and blocked and kicked and killed, he marveled at their fighting styles, so familiar, so different, so compatible. Even after all this time, she was a dancer, impossibly graceful, her opponents no more than stage props. Zima was all brutal efficiency, using the fastest and most effective way to take someone out in the shortest amount of time. Never once did they interfere with one another. Zima smiled fiercely as their opponents died around him.

It was as if no time had passed at all.

In seconds, they found each other’s arms for the first time in Zima didn’t know how long. Tears mingled with the blood on Natalia’s face. Her russet dress was shredded and smeared with gore and blood and gunpowder. Zima pulled her close.

He’d never seen anything so beautiful.

Anyone still breathing in this room would die for seeing his Spider cry.

Their lips crushed together.

It was a hard and taking kind of kiss, no gentleness to be found. A battle in its own right. Zima knew vaguely that this was their usual. Take the assassin out of the fight, but not the fight out of the assassin.

“My Zima,” she breathed against his mouth.

Zima tightened his hold. She was definitely leaving bruises across his back with her deadly hands. He was careful not to let his metal arm grip too hard against her body.

“My spider,” he whispered back.

For several minutes, there was no talking.

“What now?” he asked at last.

Natalia smiled faintly. “Well. I’m, ah… currently without country, as they say. And I assume these goons had soldiers around. We’re going to have to fight our way out.”

“Just like old times,” he said. “Who… who were they?”

“I don’t know,” Natalia said quietly. “Not KGB. I pulled some files back at the bunker, but everything here’s dataless. No paper or digital trail whatsoever. We’ll have to figure that out later.”

Zima brushed his lips over hers one last time before he forced himself to let her go, turn his fingers back to weapons. There were plenty of guns on the floor, waiting to be conscripted. He shot her a small smile. “That’s a lot of soldiers.”

Natalia tossed him his knife back just as the sirens began to wail. “I don’t know how much you remember, but we’ve been through worse.”

“I remember enough,” he said, and followed her out the door.