X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Internal surveillance cameras were proving worse than useless; their quarry moved too fast, with an agility that put monkeys to shame. By the time the guys watching the monitors could yell a warning, it was already too late.

  Toby Vanscoy found that out the hard way. He was clearing a suite of offices, herding people toward the Press Room because it had a clear route to the outside, when a scream right next to his ear alerted him to the danger.

  He reacted as he’d been trained: He took a split second to confirm the target, then opened fire. His weapon was a Sig-Sauer P226, one of the finest handguns in the world, and like every agent in the President’s detail, he was rated expert. As fast as he could pull the trigger, he emptied his fifteen-round magazine, and impossible as it was for him to admit—in the heartbeats he had to do so—not one of his rounds came close.

  The intruder bounced off the walls, he leaped from floor to ceiling, he ran as easily upside down as he did on the floor, he almost seemed to dance around Vanscoy’s shots until, so smoothly that it seemed choreographed, he hurled himself through the air in a somersault that ended with both feet hammering Vanscoy full in the chest.

  It was like being hit by a battering ram. Vanscoy flew backward through the air, holding on to his gun but losing the replacement magazine he’d been trying to load, to crash through the set of double doors that led to the main suite of offices.

  The intruder followed, straddling Vanscoy’s body only to find a half-dozen agents blocking his way. He glanced over his shoulder to see a half dozen more taking position behind him. Scarlet dots flared all over his torso as he was illuminated by their laser sights. The agents all had good cover; he was wide open. They could fire at will with minimal risk to their colleagues. They pinned him with pistols, with automatic weapons, with a sniper rifle centered right on his head. It was a drop-ceiling overhead; if he tried to stick to it, the removable panels would simply collapse. They figured they had him.

  The intruder looked down, almost in surprise, at the grating sound of Toby Vanscoy’s voice. Battered and broken as he was, the agent had his own weapon in a two-handed grip, aimed right up at him.

  “Hands behind your head,” Vanscoy ordered. “Get down on your knees! Right now!”

  “Right now!” repeated the lead agent from the group ahead of them. “No tricks, or we’ll fire.”

  The intruder snarled, baring fangs. Vanscoy pulled the trigger, hammer falling uselessly on an empty chamber . . .

  . . . and the intruder vanished.

  “Mr. President,” snapped Sid Walters, one hand pressing against his earbug in a vain attempt to make sense of all the chatter jamming his radio, “we’ve gotta go!”

  Hank Cartwright, his deputy, grabbed Walters’ arm. “We don’t know the sitch, Sid. We don’t know how many there are. We’ve got a solid defensive position, we’ve got the firepower. We’re better off staying put!”

  Walters turned on the other man in a fury. He was boss, he called the plays, there wasn’t time for debate—but before he could say a word, both entrances to the Oval Office crashed open to admit the agents who’d been stationed outside. They were coughing and choking, shrouded in gouts of thick, oily smoke.

  That same instant, the intruder appeared in midair, right in front of Cartwright. Without missing a beat, the assassin lashed out with a powerful kick to the chest. Even with Cartwright’s flak jacket and equipment blunting the force of the jackhammer blow, it was enough to throw him off his feet and into the agents behind him.

  Walters managed to snap off a shot, but his target disappeared. Before he could react, he felt the intruder’s tail around his neck, and then he was flying himself, tumbling over one of the couches and in among the agents who’d fallen in the doorway. As he struggled up, searching desperately for a weapon, one part of his mind kept repeating over and over, like a mantra: He’s got a tail! He’s got a tail! Even with the creature right in front of him, real as life, he still couldn’t believe it. He’s got a tail!

  Again and again and again, the intruder disappeared, to materialize somewhere else in the office, turning the confined space of the room to his advantage as he made mincemeat of the President’s bodyguard. It all happened so fast Walters would have to register the events in retrospect. At the moment, sick at heart, he simply realized he was too slow. There was nothing he could do to save his President.

  Alone now, with no one to protect him, George McKenna sat in his seat of power and stared into the inhuman eyes of his assassin. The eyes were strangely drained of color, and it struck him that they were dead. What little hue they possessed was an afterthought, lacking anything resembling humanity.

  The intruder had a knife, big and gleaming. Wrapped around its hilt was a brilliant red ribbon marked with flashes of gold. Poised on the edge of the desk, he rose above McKenna. The President had never been more scared, and yet never more calm. A line from somewhere or other popped from memory: “When the end is all there is, it matters.” If this was his end, he’d do the office proud.

  The gunshot made him jump in his chair.

  The intruder cried out, dropping the knife as he clutched at a shoulder suddenly turned scarlet from the impact of a 9mm shell. Instantly, his expression changed. He looked suddenly shaken, confused, and as McKenna watched, the creature’s eyes changed, gaining color and vibrancy and . . . awareness.

  Absurdly the thought came to McKenna: He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what’s happening!

  The intruder looked around and saw Alicia Vargas standing in the doorway, pistol leveled.

  Before she could take a second shot, he was gone—with the same characteristic bamf that came from air imploding inward to fill the empty space left by his body when it disappeared. And also, the President realized, the faintest scent, reminiscent of sulfur and brimstone.

  “Sir?” Alicia asked as she hurried over to him, avoiding the bodies of her fellow agents, her eyes never at rest as they swept the scene for the assassin or any like him, her gun cocked and ready. “Are you all right, Mr. President? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine, Alicia, I’m fine.” It was a lie and both of them knew it, but he was the President and this was the time for lies like that.

  “What the hell was that?” he wondered aloud.

  “Damned if I know, sir. But I sure hope he doesn’t come back.”

  “Amen.” The knife, superbly balanced, had landed point first, its weight stabbing deep into the wooden desktop. As he touched the ribbon, McKenna realized that the black flecks were writing.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked aloud.

  On the ribbon, printed in black, was a demand—or perhaps, he thought, suddenly heartsick, a declaration of war: MUTANT FREEDOM NOW!

  Interlude

  He came in to Alkali Lake the back way, over the mountains from the north. He cut through a saddleback notch and made his way down to the glacier by a trail so poor even a bighorn sheep would think twice about trying it.

  Before reaching the base of the escarpment he went to ground, taking cover in a jumbled pile of scree and rocks that gave him a superb view of the glacier and minimal chance of being seen himself. The last stretch was open country; he’d have to wait for the right moment to make his approach. He didn’t mind. When he had to, he could be inhumanly patient.

  There was a road up to the complex from the south, as miserable in its own way as the path he’d followed. Blacktop asphalt, barely two lines wide, beat to shit by the pounding of too many heavily laden trucks over too many years with hardly a thought given to maintenance. It wound its way better than seventy miles through the snowy mountains, with a decent-sized town at the far end that catered mainly to the hunting and camping crowd who wanted something wilder than Lake Louise or even Jasper. There was a hamlet some fifty miles farther that consisted of a saloon, some gas pumps, and a batch of cabins that rented by the hour.

  Trouble was, if he took the road, they’d know he was coming.

  He was a short
man, with a stocky, powerful physique, as though the frame of an athletic six-footer had been squashed down to five and change. To look at his face, you’d think him a young man, his features weathered by a life spent mainly outdoors. His dress—jeans as worn as his boots—marked him as an itinerant wrangler or cycle bum, blue collar for sure. This was a man who worked with his hands, not his mind.

  His hair was dark, sweeping back from his forehead in a wave that looked natural on him but somehow . . . wrong for a human being. He wore his sideburns long, right down to the line of his jaw, in a fashion more in keeping with the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.

  His eyes were the giveaway. Like his hair, they were right for his face, yet at the same time they had no right belonging to one so apparently youthful. These eyes missed nothing and had seen too much. They were the eyes of a hunter. A predator.

  His name was Logan, but the only reason he knew it was that it was printed on his dog tags. A name, a serial number, a blood type. No indication of nationality or branch of service. The only clue, if you could call it that, was that the information was printed in Roman letters. Not Arabic, not Cyrillic, not Chinese or Japanese kanji. He had no past worth the name, only a present filled to bursting with questions. Here was where he hoped to find some answers.

  But first he needed a storm.

  He got a beaut.

  It came in during the night, boiling off the Continental Divide with winds and snow to spare, a howling monster that seemed bent on scouring the landscape down to bare rock. The rocks afforded a fair measure of protection from the wind, but there was nothing he could do about the cold. The temperature was close to freezing before the storm. Once the blizzard started, it quickly dropped past zero. His jacket was fleece lined, but against this kind of elemental fury, that was no help at all. Hypothermia set in almost immediately. It was a pain, but he’d endured far worse. As often as he froze during the night, his healing factor kicked into gear and brought him back to life.

  The weather system proved to be as fast-moving as it was intense. Toward morning, a shift in wind velocity told him it was time to get moving. Timing was perfect. The fury of the storm had probably nailed any of the installation’s remote sensors positioned to watch the “back door.” And any living sentries were just as likely to be hunkered down in their bunkers, dreaming dreams of “Baywatch.”

  He was in place by dawn, a spectacular sunrise that went hand in hand with the equally impressive—although far more bleak—vista that spread out below him. Dominating the scene was the dam, a thousand feet high, three times that across, holding back a lake that stretched for miles. A huge generating station at its base told the reason for its existence, to provide an inexhaustible source of hydroelectric power. Thing is, there were no towering pylons marching away downriver to carry all this energy to a hungry populace. What was generated here stayed here, to be used by the Alkali Lake Industrial Complex.

  There was a fence blocking access to the crest of the dam, but it was no obstacle. The poles and links were so rusted and twisted by the fierce mountain weather that he simply stepped over. He found an older sign than the first, barely held to the fence by a scrap of wire, informing intruders that this was a government installation, a military base, and top secret besides, and warning of the most dire consequences if anyone was of a mind to trespass.

  Below the dam, the forest had been cleared for the better part of a mile to allow for the construction of the base. The layout of the complex was circular, like a defensive laager, and the scale was as impressive as the dam itself. This place had been built to last.

  So why had it been abandoned?

  The whole base was covered with snow, drifts piled over doors and windows. What roads he saw were cracked and blistered, with weeds and flowers and the occasional small tree sprouting to reclaim the land that was rightfully theirs. Windows were mostly broken. No vehicles. No tracks in the snow save his own.

  Once he made his way inside, it wasn’t any different. Long hallways and empty offices. They’d packed up the incidentals but left a fair amount of furniture, all of which had suffered from the assault of the elements, summer and winter. But the basic structure of the buildings—thick metal walls—was surprisingly sound. It was composed of a succession of strong points, compartments that could become individual fortresses all their own, almost as if the builders were as worried about an assault from within as from without.

  He wandered without obvious direction, trusting his feet and his instincts to lead him. Most of the time he trusted them far more than his intellect. To him, thinking was a liability—took too long, led down too many wrong paths. His body was a much more dependable instrument.

  He caught a strange scent but wasn’t worried. It was only a wolf, which seemed as curious about him as he was about the buildings. They stood watching each other from opposite ends of the room for a few moments before the wolf calmly turned tail and padded down a nearby flight of stairs.

  Intrigued, Logan followed, into a darkness so complete even his extraordinarily sharp eyes weren’t of much use. He pulled a mini-Maglite out of his jacket pocket, which revealed a large, circular room, as bare and nondescript as everywhere else in the base.

  Suddenly the wolf howled, the noise amplified and echoed by the cavernous space. It was a primal sound that went straight to Logan’s back brain, as it was intended to, as it had since men and wolves first shared this wilderness, and he reacted accordingly. He spun into a crouch, ready for a fight, and bared his teeth in a flash of familiar pain as three gleaming metal claws, each as long as his forearm, punched out of the body of his clenched right hand. They made a distinctive snikt sound as they emerged, like a rifle bolt being engaged. They were forged of a metal called adamantium, and they could cut steel as easily as air. The claws had bionic housings built into each forearm; his healing factor handled the wounds they made each time they were used. That same metal was laced through his skeleton, creating an amalgam with his bones that made them virtually unbreakable.

  He hadn’t been born this way. Someone had done this to him. His whole life since, the parts he remembered, anyway, had been devoted to finding out who, and why.

  The wolf was sitting in another doorway, but as Logan swung his light around he lost all interest in the animal. He crossed to the wall and raised his right hand to chest height. There were three marks in the metal, deep, parallel gashes, as though someone had slashed at the steel.

  He placed his fist by the doorjamb. His claws were a perfect fit.

  He had an answer. Once upon a time—a very long time ago—he had been here.

  He looked down, but the wolf was gone, with a fast-paced click of claws on concrete to mark its hurried exit to the surface.

  With an equally distinctive snakt sound, his claws went away. Reflexively he wiped the little bit of bloody residue from between his knuckles and took one last look around the empty room.

  He wasn’t done searching, but he was done here. Time to go home.

  Chapter

  Two

  Against a backdrop of barren, snow-swept rock, a mother wolf faced off against a hunter. She had young to protect and the blood on her muzzle spoke eloquently of her determination and ferocity. The hunter was short by modern standards but powerfully built, wrapped snugly in layers of fur that afforded protection both from the elements and the wolf’s fangs. His low forehead and prominent brow marked him as Neanderthal man. He had a spear in one hand, a club in the other. The sharply pointed stone tip of the spear was likewise flecked with blood. Each combatant had taken the measure of his foe; neither would back down until the other was dead.

  It was a typical weekday afternoon at New York’s famed American Museum of Natural History; the bulk of the visitors were schoolchildren on a variety of class trips. A clutch of them were gathered before the diorama, only half-listening to their teacher as they made whispered comments and comparisons between themselves, choosing sides as to who would win this reconstructed fight.


  The teacher herself was, in her own way, as striking as the display. It wasn’t just her height, six feet even, or, surprisingly, the dramatic shock of hair that fell straight as a waterfall to the middle of her back, colored so pure an arctic white that it gleamed like silver, providing a stark contrast to her coffee-colored skin. What marked her most was her carriage, a bearing and manner so naturally graceful you couldn’t help but think of her as royalty. She had a beauty that was breathtaking, but remarkably, she didn’t seem to notice. There was no posing to her presentation, no posturing, no flaunting of the gifts nature had so amply bestowed; she was a woman totally at one with herself. She had a ready smile, and although her voice seemed soft, you had the immediate sense that when she spoke every child in her charge would hear her and, more importantly, would listen. And lastly, there were her eyes, which were a rich, cobalt blue, the same as the sky just before it goes purple at sunset. She was a mass of contradictions whose individual elements should all have been at odds with one another; yet, when combined, the end result was the closest thing to perfection that could be imagined.

  “Contrary to popular belief,” she said to the children, “Neanderthals are not the direct ancestor of modern-day humans, but rather distant cousins who died out some thirty thousand years ago. . . .”

  With a sweep of her hand, which seemed to leave a distinctive puff of breeze in its wake, she ushered her class along to the next diorama, presenting a scene of Cro-Magnon hunters ganging up on a towering woolly mammoth. They’d backed the mammoth into a corner, where it couldn’t easily maneuver. Already a couple of stone-tipped spears were stuck in its flanks; all the men looked poised to hurl more. The mammoth had put up a powerful fight—a couple of hunters lay broken on the snow—but barring a miracle, the giant creature was doomed.