I creep after them, scurrying from doorway to doorway until I can hear what they’re saying. Zola is doing most of the talking now.
“We have to hurry. The entire facility is overrun by our enemies. Pull yourself together, or I will be forced to leave you behind.”
The Red Skull is tugging at his mask, trying to get it off.
“I have to get my bearings. I can’t breathe in this damn mask.”
He pulls the gross red-rubber thing off his head, and I can see that it’s Aleksander Lukin. My first reaction is that he’s too young. But Steve was almost as old as the Red Skull, and the same with Nick Fury and Black Widow. It’s possible. The odd thing is how he sheds the accent with the mask and becomes Lukin entirely. Is he a multiple-personality as well as a paranoid psychopath?
It doesn’t matter.
He used me to kill Steve Rogers.
At least I caught up to him before he got to that baby he was talking about.
I step out into the corridor and call his name.
“Red Skull!”
At first, he doesn’t respond. Then he turns to face me, an odd look of surprise on his face.
“You, girl? Are you talking to me?”
I pull the trigger, and I keep pulling the trigger until the pistol is empty. The man holding the Red Skull mask is dead on the floor.
I didn’t save a bullet for Zola, or for myself. But I know that I am done with killing. I know that Steve would never condone what I have done. But I am not Steve, and Steve was never compelled to kill somebody he loved. I am forced to judge Steve for how I know he would judge me, and I hate that. I can’t live with what Steve would think of me, and I can’t live with the monster responsible for making me kill Steve still being alive.
Arnim Zola’s expressionless voice drones from behind me: “The magnitude of the futility of your actions is beyond your perception.”
He is lifting his black-rubber-coated hands toward me.
A jagged shard of blackened metal punches through Zola from behind and emerges between the eyes of the holographic face on his chest. The holographic field flickers for an instant and goes blank. The robotic body collapses in an inert pile to reveal the man who was behind Zola: the man who just killed him.
He’s wearing a Captain America suit without the mask. It’s Burnside—the Cap from the fifties that I tried to rescue and then tried to shoot.
I only have one question for him:
“Are you one of the good guys now?”
FORTY-EIGHT
IT takes Bucky all of ten seconds to deal with the Kane-Meyer toughs and the single A.I.M. tech in the media booth, but the Red Skull’s daughter is already gone. Bursting into the hallway, he is confronted by a panicking crowd, all trying to get to the exits at the same time.
“Help me out, Stark. I’ve got nothing here.”
“She’s on the roof.”
Bucky jumps over one of the dead Secret Service agents at the top of the fire stairs and sprints toward the parapet, where Sin is taking aim with a rocket launcher at one of the limos below.
She glances back for a second and laughs, “Too late, Captain Moron,” and she fires the rocket.
Bucky has been airborne since before Sin started talking. He knew that with her finger on the trigger, she could still fire the rocket as he tackled her. So he calculated his own trajectory to pass over her and placed himself and his Vibranium shield between the rocket and the limo.
The rocket hits dead-center on the shield. The concussion from the explosion knocks Sin backward on the roof, and Bucky is blown straight downward.
The empty limo acts as big air bag, collapsing under the impact of the hero in the red-white-and-blue uniform. He lies still for a moment on the crumpled vehicle like a carved figure atop the sarcophagus of a Crusader knight, clutching his shield.
Two-dozen Secret Service agents circle and approach the semi-flattened limo, guns drawn and pointed.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. earpiece was damaged in the explosion. Stark’s voice had cut off in mid-sentence: “Our people on the roof have Sin in custody, and—”
The agents around the limo try hard to assess the situation.
“Is that—”
“Who the hell do you think it is, dummy?”
The Agent In Charge of the Secret Service detachment speaks out with the voice of authority.
“Stand down. Weapons on safe and holstered. Somebody give Captain America a hand down from there.”
Captain America.
A dozen hands reach out to ease the hero to his feet on the pavement. A dozen more hands reach out to clap him on the shoulder, or just to touch the shield.
A voice from the crowd beyond the agents rings out.
“Hey, Cap! Over here!”
Hundreds of mini-flashes from phone cams go off.
A thousand people are cheering and shouting.
The man who used to be a boy-soldier—who was once a Soviet assassin and thought he was lost—discovers that he is, in fact, found.
FORTY-NINE
I’M staring at a steel-reinforced concrete ceiling. Smoke is swirling around me. I hear sporadic gunfire and muffled explosions.
I sit up, and a wave of dizziness passes over me. I must have passed out for a short while. I don’t know how I had the strength to get as far as I did. The fake Steve in the fake Captain America suit is nowhere to be seen.
I fall back on my elbows as two figures approach through the dust and smoke: Black Widow and Falcon, followed by a squad of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
“Oh, Sam. And Natasha…I am so glad to see the both of you.”
Falcon kicks the inert Zola and pulls the red mask from the dead hand of the other body on the floor.
“Arnim Zola and the Red Skull. Not too shabby, Sharon.”
I think I start to cry as Sam kneels to hold me.
“I did it, Sam. I killed Steve. I didn’t mean to, but…”
Sam holds me even tighter.
“We know. Zola was controlling you. It’s all over.”
Natasha takes my free hand.
“It’s over, Sharon—and the good guys won.”
EPILOGUE 1
SHE sits on a lounge chair on the Helicarrier’s observation deck with her bare feet tucked under her. Her eyes focus inward, not on the panorama of New York City stretched out before her.
One level above, on a spidery catwalk, Tony Stark and Sam Wilson watch her and talk.
“Sharon had a miscarriage, Sam. The medical report says it was caused by a knife wound.”
“And she doesn’t remember being pregnant?”
“We think Doctor Faustus erased selective memories. He must have done that when he turned on the Red Skull.”
“Why would he do that, Tony? He set her up in the first place.”
“Who knows? People have remorse. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome in reverse. Could be, he thought he was helping her. Or it’s an early move in a complicated gambit that Faustus thinks will pay off much later. The important thing is that Sharon deserves to know the truth, but I just can’t bear to be the one to tell her.”
Sam Wilson leans on the railing and takes a deep breath.
“I’m going to take care of her for a while. I think Steve would have wanted that. And when she’s strong enough to handle it, I’ll be the one who tells her—but not today.”
EPILOGUE 2
“…AND in breaking news, Senator Wright has announced his resignation from his congressional seat and withdrawn from the presidential race, for ‘deeply personal reasons’ and to spend more time with his family—”
The cable-TV newscaster blathers on as Natalia Romanova snuggles farther into the chest of James “Bucky” Barnes on her comfortable couch in her comfortable apartment overlooking the East River.
“You’re good, Natasha. Did he even blink?”
“He knew the game was up when I showed him the copies of all the bank transfers from Kronas Corporation to his various offshore accounts—oh, look, th
ey’re playing it again.”
On the screen, the now-famous footage of Captain America being helped off the crushed limousine and cheered by the crowd is running over the newscaster’s enthusiastic commentary. Bucky clicks off the TV.
“If I watch it one more time, I’ll turn into Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.”
“Please. You’re a star now. The people love you.”
With anybody else, she would have suppressed the yawn. But she’s at home with Bucky, and feels completely at ease.
“They loved Senator Wright until this afternoon. I can’t stop thinking how close the Red Skull got to owning a president.”
Natasha perks right up.
“I enjoy seeing you like this, James—struggling with the whole Captain America thing. Remember, it’s never supposed to be easy.”
“Steve made it look that way. He made it look natural.”
“You will, too,” she says. She pulls him down on the sofa.
“Someday.”
EPILOGUE 3
IN Times Square, the man in the anonymous raincoat stops in the constant flow of pedestrian traffic. He looks up at the giant screens showing Captain America accepting the accolades of the crowd after the incident in Albany.
A drunken teenager bumps into the man, pulls back, and squints at his face. “Anybody ever tell you that you look like Steve Rogers, dude?”
“All the time.”
The inebriated teen staggers on. William Burnside continues uptown, deep in thought. He thinks that being Captain America is the toughest job in the world, and that world is completely different from the one he knew. He thinks that his old world made sense, that this new world is too decadent and wrong. He thinks that this isn’t his America.
But tomorrow will be different.
EPILOGUE 4
THE laboratory is well-hidden. There are sound baffles and passive arrays that defy all manner of sensors and detectors. It is a place that cannot be penetrated by even the most sophisticated S.H.I.E.L.D. spy devices.
Arnim Zola’s face flits across multiple monitors between bursts of static in the dark and claustrophobic space.
“There was no choice, no time for options. I assure you this is only temporary. We have had our differences, Herr Skull, but Arnim Zola is always true to his word. I swear I will be back for you, and I will alleviate these circumstances.”
One of Zola’s robotic bodies rises from the transference table, its red eye scanning the monitors. The face in the holographic chest plate is not Arnim Zola’s. It is the Red Skull.
The expression on the face is sheer horror.
EPILOGUE 5
I KNOW that Doctor Faustus played fast and loose with my memory. There’s not much I can do about that. But he couldn’t erase memories that hadn’t been made yet. He had no idea what I was going to see when Doctor Doom’s machine started to warp time and space.
He couldn’t erase the fact that I was going to see Steve Rogers still alive, but lost in the timestream. He couldn’t foresee that I would be capable of thwarting Red Skull’s plan to bring Steve back and plant himself in Steve’s body.
He couldn’t erase the feeling that I have right now, knowing that Steve is still out there. If Red Skull could pull him back, then it’s possible for Tony Stark or somebody else to do the same.
Possibilities are hope, and hope is life.
And so I allow myself to smile again.
The Death Of Captain America Page 22