white flag, steve rogers

008. parasite

chapter eight
008. parasite

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    IT WAS EVENING when they finally reached their destination. The three of them stepped out of the truck and onto dry, overgrown grass. In front of them was what seemed like an old, abandoned training field. Hidden behind electric fences and blown out lights, Agent Daniels saw old driving tracks amongst the overgrown grass. She squinted her eyes and peered through the fence at a safe distance with her hands over her brow▬as if she was looking through binoculars (and as if that was supposed to help her see better, surprisingly, it did not). Daniels saw multiple buildings. Just by the way they were set out, it didn't take her long to understand where they were▬even without glancing at the sign hanging half-on, half-off above her head. 

    The long brick buildings stretched far down the field in aisles were barracks. They look long abandoned▬forgotten and falling apart with their windows boarded in and the roofs caving in. Once upon a time, those buildings would have been full of World War Two army recruits fresh out of New Jersey. They would have marched these tracks amongst the overgrown grass, would have fired gunshots in the distant ranges, crawled through the muck and spent nights in these woods for training exercises. And most of them would have died and never returned once they left. 

    One of those soldiers was returning seventy years later, right beside her▬barely aged a few years.

    Daniels stepped back, brushing some of her hair off her face. She glanced over at the sign. Camp Lehigh. 

    "Is this it?" she asked into the open air, stepping back into line with Romanoff and Rogers. 

    "This is it," muttered Steve. 

    Natasha checked something on her phone▬glancing briefly at the coordinates she had copied down. She frowned up at the U.S. Army sign. "The file came from these coordinates..." she murmured▬if not a little confused as to why (or where) they'd be hiding something here. 

    She glanced over at Steve who had gone very serious. He was always stern and straight to the point▬grave and guarded, but right now, he sounded almost haunted when he spoke again: "So did I."

    Even with a sign warning them of the consequences if they trespassed, they stepped onto the old army camp without any trouble. It was quiet, between the group of them in an alarming, unsettling way▬Daniels felt as if she was stepping through a ghost town; a place that hasn't been touched since the last people left it. Forgotten and shadowed, frozen in time and yet destroyed by age, too. She watched her feet walk, silently following Steve and Nat along the overgrown pathways▬she imagined she was walking in someone else's shoes ... she imagined the daylight shining on this base where everything was new. She tried to imagine the sound of orders, and disciplined marching▬Pamela looked around and could somehow see a life now long gone. A era in time so bloody, and so horrible, and they remembered it ... and yet, at the very same time, it would seem they did not. Because she was sure that if they did, the choices they have made since the end of the Second World War would be very much different. 

    And now, just like the page of a history book, it was slammed closed and pushed away as soon as someone didn't need to look at it anymore. It served its purpose, and now, people moved on. Daniels stopped suddenly and crouched down, her breath hitched as she saw something glint in the grass. Her fingers reached out and astonished, she picked up an old button. As the others kept walking, she turned it around in her palm and brushed some of the dust off▬Pamela breathed a little chuckle of awe. By the size, she knew it would have been a spare from someone's shirt.