Chapter Text
“Jane, something seriously fucked up is going on,” are the first words out of Darcy's mouth.
“Well it had better be, because you are two hours late,” Jane snaps into the phone, while making her own coffee, and why are there no clean mugs? She could swear she did dishes just the other day – while the data she recovered on Tuesday was collating, which was only . . . she looks over at Erik's quote-of-the-day calendar, the one he insisted on getting her and tacking up next to the coffee maker so she would, quote, “maintain some semblance of connection with the world”.
It's apparently Monday again. That would explain the lack of mugs. Not so much the lack of Darcy. “Elaborate on 'seriously fucked up'.” There's a faint smell of smoke wafting in from somewhere, despite that the windows are closed.
“I think it's maybe the zombie apocalypse.”
Jane blinks at a not-too-dirty-maybe-passable-she-has-a-good-immune-system-anyway mug. “Darcy-”
“No, I'm totally dead serious here, my neighbor just tried to like, eat me. In the bad way. Of course considering she's like sixty and had questionable personal hygiene even before her presumed un-death, anything would be the bad way, but – yeah. My neighbor, zombified. I've got my cheap-as-shit Ikea dresser in front of the door, and I'm not thinking that's gonna hold long.”
Jane puts the mug down. “Did you go out last night? Are you still drunk? Oh my god, did someone put something in your drink?”
“What?” No, I am not roofied, Jane, I'm -”
“Don't move, I'm coming to get you,” Jane says decisively, in her best non-panicked, soothing voice. She glances briefly down at her clothes, realizes she hasn't actually changed them all weekend and that she probably smells, but tells herself firmly that the ER will not care, and neither will Darcy.
“If you try to come get me, my neighbor is going to have you for lunch!” Darcy shouts into the phone; Jane winces, and loses a guilty argument with herself over whether it makes her a terrible, terrible person to set last night's figures to running before she goes to get her poor drugged friend. Intern. Poor dependent fellow woman in need and Jane is so very going to hell, but it's only a few keystrokes and she doesn't believe in hell anyway.
“Jane. Listen to me. You're at the lab, right? Do not leave the lab. What you need to do is call SHIELD, get them to send people with guns. Lots of guns. All the guns.”
“Okay, Darcy,” Jane says absently, tapping a last key and then spinning around looking for her keys. On the hook by the door? Of course not. “Just stay there.”
“You're not listening to me!” Darcy screams. “I do not want to have to stick a bread knife through your eye when you become the hungry dead, Jane!”
“That's not going to happen.” Jane murmurs, tossing papers every which way; how can she possibly lose her keys this often? She found a whole other civilization on another form of celestial body that isn't even a planet and thus, she discovered that too – point being, she should be able to find her damn keys in an emergency. What if atmospheric conditions were coalescing so as to be favorable for an event right now, and she couldn't find her keys?
. . not that she wants Darcy waiting.
“Look, forget it, okay?” Darcy's saying. “I'll be fine. I'll call a cab.”
“There's no cab service in this town,” Jane reminds her. Her toe hits something that jingles as she scurries between tables – which points out that, crap, she's not wearing shoes – but, keys!
“Just don't come looking for me, I couldn't live with it if you got zombified trying to come get me!” Darcy pleads.
“Alright,” Jane lies blithely, even as she shoves her feet into one of the many pairs of discarded shoes occupying the space under her desk – they may actually be Darcy's shoes – and heads for the door.
Just in time to see the guy who runs the gas station down the street fling himself bodily against her window, teeth snapping at the glass, the left side of his neck mostly missing and his head hanging at an unnatural angle.
Jane screams and drops the phone.
“Jane? Jane!” Darcy's voice echoes up from the floor. “Don't let them bite you! Aim for the head!”
The man at the window paws at the glass, teeth making high screeching sounds against it, hands leaving unsteady smears of blood. Three of his fingers are missing on the right. His eyes are glazed.
Pupils fixed and dilated.
She can see the dangling end of a very large vein coming out of his neck. It's not spurting. It's not even gushing. It's sort of . . . dripping.
Her fingers shake, and it takes her three tries to get the phone back up to her ear, Darcy screaming survival tips between frantic calls of her name.
“There's a dead guy at the window,” Jane says faintly.
“I told you!” shrieks Darcy.
“I should call SHIELD,” Jane says.
“You think?” Darcy echoes.
“Why didn't you call SHIELD?”
“Because I called you, dumbass, I know you're not genre-savvy enough to survive without me!”
“Thank you,” Jane replies with feeling. She's vaguely aware of the sound of an approaching helicopter.
“Jane? Are you going all traumatic-shock-ish on me? Hold it together, girl.”
“Don't call me girl, I'm your boss,” Jane objects. The helicopter is getting very loud. “I'm going to hang up and call -”
And then the guy outside the window's head explodes.
Jane does some more screaming, and so does Darcy, and then there's a red-haired woman in a black body suit dropping down a zip line and making extremely short work of the very expensive lock on the front door.
“Dr. Foster?” the woman asks. Jane stares. The woman's eyes dart to the screaming phone on the floor; she strides over and picks it up.
“Miss Lewis? Yes. Yes. 10 minutes,” she says, then disconnects the call, hands the phone to Jane, and says, “You're being evacuated.”
“I – what -” Jane stammers.
The redhead looks at her like she's considering the need for sedation, which snaps Jane out of it. “My equipment -”
“Can be replicated much more easily than can you,” the redhead snaps. “Come on.”
And Jane comes on, which involves being towed by harness up into the waiting chopper while the terrifying woman who's just rescued her takes down six more of Jane's former neighbors, who have begun converging on the noise. The smell of smoke is strong outside, though she can't spot the source of the fire. Jane thinks she can hear distant screaming before the sound of the spinning blades drowns out everything.
The redhead introduces herself as Agent Romanov; the equally terrifying man hanging out the side of the chopper and shooting exploding arrows into the rapidly-growing crowd below them is Agent Barton. The pilot doesn't introduce herself, though she's busy on the phone using words like “asset retrieved”.
Jane is momentarily indignant at being an asset; then Romanov says, “You're just wasting ammo, Barton, this place is done,” and Jane decides maybe she can live with asset-hood. Her mind starts spinning to everyone she's interacted with in this tiny town in the last several years, most of them familiar faces whose names she never bothered to know. A good percentage of the shuffling hoard below them are children, she can see that before they're taking to the sky.
“Darcy -” Jane begins frantically as they lift off.
“We're retrieving her next,” Romanov interrupts, while Barton retreats more securely into the chopper and begins doing something fussy with his bow; Jane knows nothing about bows, but she knows the look of someone who's ten seconds from losing it. It makes her spontaneously like him.
“And Erik – Dr. Selvig -”
Romanov's face goes even further blank.
“No,” Jane says, flatly, like the vehemence of her tone can change things. The words haven't been said yet. It's not real yet.
Romanov just looks pointedly out the open side of the chopper.
From the altitude they've attained, Jane can see the row of newly-built condos where Erik was renting, on the outskirts of town – developers hoping to convince someone this backwater could be tranquilly trendy.
It's burning. No, it's burnt. The homes are just blackened beams. Nothing is moving but the last dregs of flame. There's another chopper retreating from the area.
“He could have gotten out!” Jane screams, over the sound of the blades. They're all screaming, really, to be heard – some of them are just screaming more calmly than others.
“He didn't,” Romanov says flatly. “Beta Team confirmed.”
Jane just stares at her. No one tells you that someone's dead that way. No one. It can't be real, because no one -
“At least you know he's not still out there,” Barton offers her, shooting Romanov a look – at which Romanov blinks, unimpressed. “That he had a clean death.”
“Fire?” Jane asks, overwhelmed, horrified, unable to believe she's having this conversation. She's going to wake up. “You think burning alive is a good way to go?”
It's one of those dreams where you think you woke up and started your day, but then the alarm goes off. Any second now the sunlight will hit her eyes through the window and she'll realize she's drooled another keyboard into uselessness. She has to.
Barton and Romanov exchange looks. They open their mouths simultaneously.
“Nat-” Barton begins.
“Dr. Selvig was infected,” Romanov says, perhaps a fraction more gently than she's been speaking. Maybe Jane's expression is as unreal as she feels. “Beta Team took him down. We wouldn't leave one of our own like that.”
“You couldn't just leave it?” Barton says. “Jesus, Nat.”
“She deserves the truth,” Romanov says, eyes still on Jane.
Ten numb minutes later they're pulling Darcy and her backpack of canned goods out of her window. Darcy flings herself at Jane; Jane's arms go around her automatically, but weakly, like she'd sort of forgotten she had limbs. Darcy pulls back, face tear-streaked but jaw firm. “Hey,” she says, smiling a reasonable facsimile of her usual shit-eating grin. “It's gonna be okay – okay? We're gonna make it. We're the survivors, I mean, dude, you're a crazy scientist. Your survival is all but guaranteed, here. We're gonna be fine.”
Jane stares.
Darcy bites her lip and says, “Jane?”
Jane looks at her.
Darcy curls up next to her, pulling Jane's legs across her bent knees and Jane's head into her chest. She begins stroking Jane's hair, gently, like Jane's mother used to do. Before she died.
***
“How long will it take you to re-create a working Bifrost?” are the first words out of Director Fury's mouth. They've landed on a helicarrier. Jane didn't know helicarriers existed. “Assume funds and resources are not an object. This is now our one and only priority.”
“Dude, why aren't the zombies the priority?” Darcy interjects, before Jane can even think of a response. “I mean, sure, god-like warrior vikings would be useful and all, but . . . “
Director Fury is silent in a way that is an answer in and of itself.
“Because it's global already, isn't it? We've already lost,” Jane says, just to hear the words out loud. “Because we're not looking for aid. We're looking for a place to evacuate.”
“Earth as we knew it is, for the time being, fatally compromised,” Fury affirms.
Jane thinks the words sound wrong, too calm, too matter-of-fact, but then thinks – how should the words sound? No one has ever had to say those words before.
“Dr. Foster, Ms. Lewis, your project is our last chance of salvaging something of our culture and biodiversity elsewhere. I have teams around the globe at this moment, retrieving . . what they can.”
“Noah's Ark,” Jane whispers.
“Call the project whatever you want,” Fury replies. “Just get to work. The human race ran out of time yesterday.”