Wolverine: Weapon X

by Marc Cerasini

  As he matured, his reserve increased: He stuttered. He felt afraid of everything. He exhibited violent tendencies.

  His father found another boarding school, where he arrived at fourteen. But the new school was far less… accommodating.

  “Big brain, stutter for us. Ca… ca… can you do th … th… that?”

  My tormentors. The mocking Greek chorus that was my peers.

  Finally, one of the older boys found him in an empty classroom and just touched him.

  “My God. The police at Bedford Science Academy. Disgraceful,” said Dean Stanton to his father.

  “That poor boy. What did my son do to him?”

  What did I do? I took the scalpel I was using to dissect a formaldehyde-drenched frog and hacked at his face, again and again. And when I was done, under all that blood, I saw what I’d done… what I wanted to do to Colonel Otumo’s face.

  “You understand, Doctor, that we have to cover this up. The school’s reputation must not suffer.”

  “But the victim—”

  “His father will understand. A graduate. School tradition and all. But we’ll have to send your son away, perhaps to a school in Switzerland. In any case, he can never return to Bedford. We cannot let this incident mar our reputation.”

  “But what about the victim?”

  “The family of course, will demand a financial settlement. But I’m sure your wife’s fortune—”

  “My late wife’s fortune.”

  “Indeed. Your fortune will surely cover the expense.”

  My education continued, unmolested. I had discovered the secret… the key to controlling humans.

  Fear was the key.

  With Weapon X, the ultimate soldier the key is in my hands.

  * * * * *

  “I didn’t like spending the whole goddamn night in this freezing bunker, that’s for sure,” Lynch said for about the hundredth time.

  “Come on, Lynch, you’re giving me a headache,” said Franks, who was already suited up.

  But Lynch wouldn’t shut up. He just kept talking and scratching his growling stomach. “Figure it out, Cutler—triple duty—that’s double-time-and-a-half for the last eight-hour shift. Can’t wait to see Deavers’s face when I put in that overtime requisition.”

  Cutler had done his best to ignore Lynch since dawn, but he was only human. “Don’t spend it yet. We might be in here all day, and all night tonight, too. That means no breakfast and no lunch—and you without a bag of chips.”

  “Don’t even say that. Don’t even, Cutler.” His voice went up an octave. Cutler had suspected that Lynch was suffering from cabin fever before they’d got trapped in the bunker. Now he was sure Lynch was losing it.

  Can’t blame him. Stuck in this bunker for twenty hours now, waiting for the eggheads to decide what to do.

  “Don’t get your underwear in a bunch over your beloved junk food, Lynch,” said Cutler. “If you’ve got the munchies, you can always take your chances outside. Go on, walk right past him to the fence. Hell, Logan might not wake up.”

  Lynch slumped on the bench where he’d spent most of the night. “I may be hungry, but I ain’t crazy; Cutler. That’s your vocation.”

  Cutler turned his back on Lynch to stare through the narrow view slits. Logan had spent the night laying in the now frozen gore, wolf carcasses stiffening around him. For all he knew, Subject X was dead.

  A blessing, after what I saw…

  Cutler was still processing the senseless scene he’d witnessed the day before. He couldn’t figure out how that butchery could have anything to do with research, with knowledge—with creating the perfect weapon.

  It wasn’t an experiment. It was more like an atrocity; a massacre. Blood sport, not science.

  Franks looked up at Cutler, his youthful face curious. “Was he like that when you brought him in?”

  “Who?”

  Franks gestured with his chin. “Logan. Weapon X Word is you and Erdman and another guy brought him in. That he was a wanted criminal or something—wasn’t a volunteer at all.”

  Cutler saw no point in lying. “He was tough. Gave me this—” he pointed to the scar that cut his eyebrow in half and divided his forehead. “Guess I had it coming, though, seeing what they have done to him so far.”

  The intercom buzzed, and the communications console came to life. One of the technicians rose from the corner where he’d been curled up and kicked his friend.

  Yawning, they both crawled into their seats and flipped a few switches.

  Lynch poked Franks. “This is it, kid. We’re going home.”

  The intercom crackled to life. “Wranglers?”

  “Cutler here.”

  “This is Cornelius. Bring him in.”

  Lynch slapped his knees and started to suit up. Franks and Cutler strapped on their helmets. Before they went out, Cutler tested the power on the electropod.

  “Ready?” said Cutler at the hatch. Franks nodded, face grim. Lynch cradled the tranquilizer gun. “Let’s go,” he barked.

  Cutler threw the latch and stepped outside. The cold hit him like a fist and the wind howled loudly—he hadn’t noticed it was blowing from inside.

  Franks came out next, and Lynch brought up the rear after he’d secured the hatch behind him. The technicians inside the bunker hardly seemed to notice they’d gone.

  “Stay back about fifteen paces, Lynch. Franks and I will come up on either side.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  The morning was overcast, the mountains shrouded in haze. As they crossed the snowy expanse, the hoarfrost crunched under their heavy boots.

  “God, look at that,” whispered Franks. He stared down at something red and bloody in the snow. Cutler refused to look. The wolves were all dead, their carcasses frozen solid. Solidified blood smooth as wine-colored glass and slippery under their feet. Franks slipped and Cutler shot him a look. “No sudden moves,” he yelled.

  But Cutler himself nearly jumped backward when he saw Logan’s open eyes. They stared at the sky as if he were watching clouds. Franks and Cutler moved to surround him.

  Cutler positioned the control prongs over the magnetic clamps in Logan’s temples. Then he flicked the button. The magnets locked with a click loud enough to be heard above the howling wind.

  With a gentle tug, like pulling the reins of a horse, Logan sat up, then rolled to his knees. Cutler brought the pole up and over his head stepping around the subject, per protocol.

  When Logan finally stumbled to his feet, Franks moved in with the leash and clamped it around the mutant’s throat. Logan didn’t even blink. Still, as a precaution, Lynch aimed the tranquilizer gun at the small of his back.

  Cutler gave Logan a push, which caused the mutant to lurch forward, shuffling stiffly toward the pen and the underground elevator beyond.

  13

  Golem

  “Dr. Cornelius, sir? Sorry to disturb you—”

  The astonished technician stood with a stack of files in his hands, staring in muted shock at the patchwork man sprawled on a steel operating table.

  “Huh? I can’t hear you.” Cornelius shook his head and tapped the mask-and-visor combination that muffled his hearing. The tech had found the doctor surrounded by several assistants, stooped over Logan, Cornelius’s face inches from the subject’s.

  “I said I’m sorry to disturb you,” the tech repeated, speaking loudly. “Dr. Hendry wants you to have the results of yesterday’s brain angiography, along with the figures on the blood gas test from the diagnostic lab.”

  Cornelius paused, scalpel in hand, though he barely glanced up from his task. “Great. Um, just put them on the pile,” he mumbled.

  “Sir, ah, Dr. Hendry wanted me to tell you—”

  “Just give me one second,” said Cornelius.

  The tech watched as the doctor pierced the corner of Logan’s right eye, then slid the scalpel down all the way to the base of the man’s nose. Cornelius jumped back as a spurt of black blood narrowly missed
splattering his visor. The gash he made was deep enough to expose bone.

  As blood bubbled up from the wound and pooled on the yellow stain-resistant surface of the operating table, an assistant in a gore-spattered lab coat placed a small diamond drill in Cornelius’s hand.

  Using a laser dot projected from a ceiling-mounted surgical scope as his guide, Cornelius activated the power tool and drilled a small hole into the subject’s exposed skull, right below the eye socket. Bits of bone flecked Cornelius’s visor. As the shrill, dentist-chair whine filled the room, a pink-tinged tear rolled down Logan’s cheek. An assistant quickly wiped it away with a cotton swab.

  “Careful, Dr. Cornelius,” warned Carol Hines, seated at the CAT scan monitor a few feet away. “No more than two centimeters into the brain pan or you risk damage to the nerve cluster.”

  “Done.” Cornelius pulled back and cut the power. He set the drill aside and faced the tech. “You had a question?”

  The technician nodded. “Dr. Hendry would like you to suspend the blood anomaly test until after this phase of the experiment is complete. He says since the lockdown his resources are limited, and the hematologist has been tied up for three days—”

  “I know how long he’s been tied up,” Cornelius snapped. “I’m tired of waiting for results from that ‘expert’ as well. So what’s Hendry’s point?”

  “He… Dr. Hendry said he needs the hematologist for his own work. Said if you told the specialist what you are looking for, the work might go faster.”

  As he spoke, the young tech’s eyes never strayed from Subject X on the table.

  “If I knew what I was looking for I’d have found it myself!” Cornelius replied.

  “Sir? Is that what you want me to tell Dr. Hendry?”

  “No. Tell Dr. Hendry that he and his staff are not here to question my requests, only to fulfill them. Tell him to remember who is in charge.”

  As the technician backed out of the lab, Cornelius angrily returned to his work. He snatched a long copper probe from his assistant’s hand. Then he looked up at Carol Hines. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” she replied as she adjusted the angle of the real-time brain scan.

  “That’s fine, Ms. Hines. Freeze that image.” Cornelius watched a monitor embedded in the wall. “I can see the nerve cluster quite clearly.”

  Stooping over Logan again, Cornelius slid the long needlelike probe through the fresh-drilled hole and into Subject X’s brain with a single smooth thrust.

  Cornelius stepped back as the assistant moved in with Teflon thread to seal the flesh around the protruding probe. With the procedure completed, Cornelius tore the hot mask from his face. Unlike his two assistants, who were clad head to toe in laboratory whites, Cornelius wore only a gore-streaked surgical apron over his shirt, vest, and tie. It made him feel like he’d just stepped out of a Victorian novel—a harried London physician, perhaps, or an East End slaughter-man…

  “Stitch him up,” Cornelius tossed over his shoulder. “I’m back in fifteen.”

  As he went, Cornelius snatched new files from the top of the teetering stack, leaving a bloody thumbprint on the cover sheet. He wiped his sticky hands on his apron, then strode into an adjacent lab, where he tossed the files onto an empty desk and doused his hands at the sink.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Abraham B. Cornelius, M.D., was disgusted by the sloppy surgery he’d just performed—operating without anesthetic, without sterile implements or sterilized conditions. He doubted he’d even remembered to wash his hands after breakfast and before he’d begun working hours earlier.

  My techniques these days are positively medieval, he thought, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter. Sepsis has no more effect on Logan than a mosquito bite.

  In the past weeks, as the Professor pressured Cornelius and Hines for faster results, Cornelius was forced to take shortcuts. One of the first protocols he’d dispensed with was sterile lab conditions.

  Too damn many operations happening for such safeguards. Two this week, three last—and that doesn’t even count minor procedures like the one I’ve just performed.

  Retraining and reprogramming Weapon X wasn’t Cornelius’s only goal, either. He’d decided to launch his own private quest to unlock the secret healing potential of Logan’s blood.

  But as he leafed through the latest report, he discovered that the hematologist was no closer to explaining the “unusual structures” or the “curious proteins” found in Logan’s blood than he’d been eight days ago.

  The electron microscope might help, but Hendry has booked that facility solid. He’s keeping me away from his precious toy out of spite, I’m sure of it.

  Cornelius slammed the cover on the files and pushed them aside. With conditioning trials about to begin, he knew he would have even less time to devote to the study of Logan’s phenomenal immune system. Performing tasks assigned to him by the Professor ate up virtually all of his waking hours.

  Perhaps when this preposterous Weapon X program is back on track—when the Professor has made Subject X his walking, stalking, killer-on-a-string—then I can catch a break, do the real work with Subject X. The work Logan was born for…

  Over the speaker, a soft-spoken command interrupted his desperate thoughts. “Dr. Cornelius, please report to Lab Seven at once…”

  * * * * *

  “Hey, Rice! Where’re you going?”

  Communications Tech Rice spun around to find a man approaching him from the opposite end of a darkened corridor.

  “Is that you, Cut?”

  Cutler emerged from the shadows a moment later. Rice recognized him and visibly relaxed.

  “You looked spooked, Rice. What’re you up to? Feeling guilty?”

  Rice shook his head. “Thought you might be the Professor, that’s all. He’s been riding our butts for a week now. I don’t think that guy ever sleeps. And with this big remote guidance test tomorrow, the whole communications department is working double time to get the technology up and running. The job stinks, man.”

  “Yeah, we miss your sunny disposition down in security.” Cutler replied. As he spoke, Cutler located a precise point on the steel wall and slammed it with his fist. The lights in the corridor sprang to life, bright enough to cause both men to blink.

  “A two-billion-dollar complex, and the lights don’t work,” said Rice. “This place is falling apart.”

  “You seen Anderson?”

  “Yeah, this morning, with Subject X.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Cutler said. “I go in to prep Subject X for the 0800 experiment and find his cell empty.”

  “Doc Cornelius called for him at 0430. Anderson was on duty and brought Logan down to the lab himself.”

  “Without adequate backup. And Anderson never entered the transfer on the docket or wrote it up in the roster. That’s three security protocol violations. And to make it worse, until I ran into you I didn’t have a clue where Logan was. How good a security chief does that make me?”

  Rice chuckled. “About as good as the last one, I reckon.”

  “Don’t ever let Deavers hear you say that. I’m his second choice.”

  “Hell, Cut, I wouldn’t have chosen you at all.”

  * * * * *

  The Professor entered the lab at 0759. He wore a crisp, white lab coat over his tailored suit, a clipboard tucked under his arm. With relaxed confidence, he stepped up to the operating table.

  “How are we proceeding, Dr. Cornelius?”

  “Spinal codes are in,” Cornelius reported. “It’s just a matter of final sensor grafts now.”

  The Professor stared down at the unconscious Subject X. Logan lay flat on his back on the adjustable operating table. The probes Cornelius had placed in the subject’s brain now had huge feeder boxes connected to them. The devices dangled from Logan’s cheeks, under eyes that had been sewn closed with surgical thread. Bundles of fiberoptic wires threaded their way in and out of the subject’s flesh through punctures at each of Logan
’s critical nerve clusters.

  His forearms were raised and locked into restraints, hands open. Each finger had a long electromedical probe embedded at its base that stuck in the air like an antenna. Thin fiberoptic cables ran between his fingers like delicate webbing, and thicker bundles of Teflon-coated wires snaked in and out of the muscles in his forearms like artificial veins.

  More wires were being added to Logan’s feet, ankles, and behind his knees by a group of technicians supervised by several of Dr. Hendry’s staff physicians. Electricians and communications specialists primed a thirty-pound battery and hooked it up to a steel cybernetic helmet married by wireless connection to Carol Hines’s Reifying Encephalographic Monitor.

  The Professor tapped the microwave-receiving box dangling from a thick wire bundle attached to the base of Logan’s spine.

  “And the distribution of the signal? What is our range?” he asked.

  “About a three-mile radius, sir,” Cornelius replied.

  The Professor frowned. “But that is so very limited, Doctor. Is that all you can give me?”

  “Professor, if you want a puppet, you have to have strings.” It was clear from the doctor’s tone that Cornelius saw the remote control phase of the experiment as a waste of time and effort.

  The Professor’s frown increased. “Yes… indeed… I do want a puppet, as you put it. But my design specifically called for a radius of at least ten miles.”

  Cornelius nodded impatiently. “I know that. But the batteries are just too heavy I don’t know why we couldn’t have stayed with the on/off system, anyway. Weight wasn’t a factor, because we didn’t need batteries for that.”

  The Professor focused his cold eyes on his colleague. “I will have my way on this, Cornelius. A ten-mile radius.”

  Cornelius met the Professor’s gaze for a moment, then relented. “Okay. Load him down. See if I care. You can turn him into a traveling radio station if you like.”

  Hearing the short-tempered exchange, Carol Hines looked up from her terminal, then quickly averted her eyes.

  “Your dissent is noted, Dr. Cornelius. But let’s not be testy; hmm?” The Professor’s tone dripped with condescension.