X-Men: The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  In quick succession came three more, bracketing Magneto’s cadre of mutants on all sides as Ororo streaked into view from a point only Magneto could perceive atop the main building of the prison.

  While this was happening, in those precious seconds that their adversaries were reeling from Ororo’s assault, the X-Men took the field.

  Hank McCoy leapt impossibly from roof to wall to roof to wall to wall, bouncing effortlessly back and forth as he made his way to a landing in the yard.

  Peter Rasputin simply dropped, full metal body, like a solid steel rock—despite the risk that represented against the powers of Magneto—to make a nifty crater of his own.

  Logan slid down the face of the building, using his claws to thrust into the masonry wall and slow his descent.

  Kitty Pryde came down with Bobby Drake in her arms, phasing the pair of them so that when they reached ground level, they simply disappeared into the earth. A moment or so later, they popped right back up, like corks on a wave. Kitty, with Bobby by her side, clambered to the surface. She was grinning with delight. He looked ready to hurl.

  “Don’t ever do that again.”

  She rolled her eyes. Some guys were just plain useless.

  The lieutenant commanding the force on Alcatraz recognized McCoy, despite his outlandish getup, and couldn’t help staring. Presidential cabinet officers don’t generally take the field of combat, much less clad in formfitting costumes.

  “Pull back your troops, Lieutenant,” McCoy told him, with the full authority that only someone used to having the ear of the president can muster. “Let the X-men handle this.”

  “Sir,” the lieutenant swallowed, well aware of what McCoy was asking and not altogether sure his men would follow, “this is our post, sir. Six of you, sixty-five of them. Those odds suck! We can help.”

  Hank acknowledged the offer, knowing what it meant for sapien troops to volunteer to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with mutants, allowing himself the hopeful thought Perhaps some lasting good might come from this mess.

  “You’ve done your part and more, Lieutenant,” he told the young man. “Go. Now. That’s an order.”

  Hank had no place in the officer’s chain of command, but such was the natural force of his voice that the lieutenant responded with a crisp salute and did as he was told.

  “Mind you,” Hank mused to Logan by his side, “given those odds, he does have a point.”

  Logan snorted. Hank considered that for someone like the Wolverine, with his temperament and capabilities, he probably thought of this as a fair fight.

  “Get together, people,” Logan told them. “Side by side. Whatever comes, we hold the line. We defend this place, and the people in it, at all costs.”

  Magneto shook his head.

  “Traitors to their own cause.” Forgive me, Charles, he thought. For the cause we both champion, I must destroy these children you hold most dear. “We must finish them,” he told his mutants, and both tone and expression left no doubt as to what he meant by “finish.” As far as he was concerned, this battle would be to the death. He would ask no quarter, nor grant any in return. “Every last one.”

  He turned his eyes to Jean, who met his gaze but made no other move.

  At Magneto’s signal, his mutants charged. A phalanx of almost forty against a line of five.

  Logan didn’t wait for them to reach him; for him the best defense was always offense.

  Ten came for him, and he took them down without breaking a major sweat, without even popping his claws.

  He was quick, but that was just the start of it. His healing factor gave Logan a reaction time that was significantly greater than the average sapien, or the average mutant. He rarely needed to think as he fought, on any conscious level; his body—working through backbrain and instinct and physical memory—did that for him. He reacted to the slightest of cues, on levels more subtle than most hunting dogs, which allowed him to begin his counter at virtually the same time, so it seemed to his adversaries as though he was reading their minds, anticipating their every attack.

  For his opponents, it was even worse when bodies actually made contact. The Wolverine’s skeleton was laced with adamantium, and striking him was akin to hitting bars of a metal far stronger than steel. Punching him in the jaw invariably broke a hand and the same applied to any blunt force object like a cudgel. When he struck back, it usually took only a single blow for lights-out.

  The claws were a last resort, his ultimate weapon. He finished this initial engagement without needing them, save for a sideways slash through a lighting stanchion to drop it as a temporary barrier between one group of combatants and the next.

  McCoy was even faster in speed and reaction time. Unlike Logan, he possessed an unnatural grace that made him seem almost weightless. He seemed utterly at home on any surface, floor or ceiling, vertical or horizontal, stationary or mobile. Even masonry in midcollapse could be turned into a momentary perch or pivot point that allowed McCoy to move from one opponent to the next without the slightest pause, as though the entire engagement had been choreographed. Combined with an acrobatic agility that would make an Olympian gymnast weep, the Beast was nearly untouchable, definitely unbeatable.

  Hank caught a punch in one hand, flipped the man head over heels into the two beside him, leapt for a wall, bounced off the head of another mutant, yanked him into the air, grabbed a pole, and used momentum to make a 360-degree pivot in time to slam a foot into the now-falling mutant’s belly before dropping back into the heart of the fray. And all the while, his face was split by a grin of true delight, as he reveled in a true and outrageous physicality that had been straightjacketed for far too long within his bespoke Savile Row suits, strapped down as cruelly as young Warren Worthington’s wings.

  Twenty of Magneto’s crew in as many seconds. That was the score when Hank and Logan came together, back-to-back, at skirmish’s end.

  “We’ve cut their numbers by a third,” Hank crowed.

  “Thought you were a pacifist,” Logan growled, looking for Magneto, crying out in his mind for Jean, thinking, This was way too easy.

  “As Churchill said, ‘There must come a time when all men must—’”

  The second wave came, as many as the first, but much nastier to look at.

  McCoy shrugged. “You get the point,” he said, and leapt back into the fray.

  Ororo rose skyward at the same time, eyes flaring white as she gathered winds and power to her, pulling moisture from sea and air to generate a massive cloud formation just off the island’s shore.

  Thunder shook the rocky island, and a series of sympathetic, almost electronic twangs, like the plucked strings of an untuned guitar, sounded along the length of the bridge as the boom established a cascade of vibrations across the suspender cables.

  In the space of a few heartbeats, Ororo ramped up her storm to better than Category Five on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and unleashed its full fury into the heart of the attackers, striking them with wind-driven rain that knocked some off their feet and left the rest too dazed and disoriented to cope with the storm surge that followed, a wave that rose to twice their height and swept the battlefield clean of debris and combatants.

  Because of the close quarters of the combat, Ororo had to come down low to wield her weather with the necessary precision of force and placement. There were no fliers left among Magneto’s troops, no sign yet of any energy casters like Pyro, so she thought her position fairly secure.

  Callisto proved her wrong, demonstrating a strength and agility—and daring—that was on par with McCoy as she scrambled up one of the suspender cables and hurled herself at Storm with headlong abandon.

  Ororo sensed the shift in the air that heralded the other woman’s approach, but had to make sure her weather was safely under control, costing her the split second needed to properly respond to Callisto’s attack. The woman had a knife and raked it across Ororo’s body, scoring the leather of her uniform and leaving a trail of fire in its wa
ke that told Ororo she’d drawn blood. The impact followed a moment later, as Callisto wrapped both legs around the taller woman for an anchor, hammering at her with a clenched fist while trying again and again with the knife for more blood. Being up in the air clearly didn’t faze her in the slightest; she must have simply assumed that Storm’s power would keep them aloft until Callisto killed her or she got too distracted to maintain it. Either way, they’d fall, and she knew that Callisto would try to make sure that Storm landed on the bottom.

  Ororo refused to fall. She did the reverse and shot the pair of them better than a mile straight up in the blink of an eye. Callisto paid no attention, instead cracking her forehead against Storm’s hard enough to revert the silver eyes back to normal. As they started to tumble, as shock severed Storm’s link with the winds that propelled them aloft, Callisto hammered at her with her fist, to the throat, the head, the face, to whatever part of her she could reach. She’d find her own way to survive, she had no doubt, just so Storm didn’t. She was good at that.

  She tried stabbing as well, but Storm caught that hand in hers, using the greater length of her arm to keep it well clear.

  Callisto squeezed her thighs together, as hard as she could, and was rewarded by a grunt of pain from her foe.

  She grinned—this was her moment—and wrenched her knife hand loose. Callisto didn’t try stabbing, she knew Storm would block her, but instead flipped the blade end over end towards her own waiting left hand. She’d go for a quick grab, and a quicker stab to the other woman’s unprotected flank, end of story. She’d never know what hit her.

  But her fingers closed empty……and Callisto felt an awful mix of fire and ice course through her own chest, which suddenly refused to draw in any more air.

  Uncomprehending, she dropped her gaze, to behold the hilt of her weapon just below her breast, a perfectly placed thrust to the heart.

  She looked back into Ororo’s eyes and saw a hardness in them that put her own inner armor to shame. Storm had plucked the knife from midair—Callisto couldn’t believe she had such speed in her—and delivered the final blow to Callisto instead, without a moment’s hesitation, without a shred of mercy.

  She tried to speak, tasted blood, felt her face twist into an unaccustomed expression that was a silent plea for salvation. She’d never in her mutant life considered the possibility of dying. Facing it at last, she was terrified.

  As her eyes closed, her head lolled, and her legs lost their grip. The face before her remained unrelenting.

  But when Callisto fell, Ororo caught her.

  She’d come of age in a war zone, in a place and at a time where girls were generally considered of no consequence, and learned to defend herself long before her mutant powers manifested.

  Killing came easy.

  That’s why she strove to find a better way.

  Back on Alcatraz, further along the line, Bobby found himself confronted by a behemoth who called himself Phat for reasons that were grossly obvious. The files held in the Mansion mentioned a mutant who worked in a carnival, with a similar physique, who called himself the Blob, but Fred J. Dukes was a matinee idol compared to this guy. Phat’s footsteps set off tremors through the rock and threatened to bring down whatever walls of the barracks still remained upright.

  Bobby tried freezing the ground to upend him, but Phat was so massive that the ice merely shattered underfoot.

  Fortunately, he was no speed demon, and Bobby had little trouble ducking and dodging his grabs. There wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room and the fight around them was devolving into a madcap melee. None of the X-Men could afford to devote themselves overlong to a single adversary, for fear of becoming vulnerable to someone else.

  Desperation produced inspiration and, instead of a sheet of ice, Bobby chose to form a pillar instead, to enfold the other man. This way, except perhaps by tripping, Phat couldn’t bring his weight effectively to bear. And if he should manage to fall, Bobby was determined to build an ice mountain on top of him, to make sure he wouldn’t soon get up.

  Phat still managed two or three more steps before the ice locked him in place. Despite Bobby’s efforts, he was still struggling and Bobby knew that if he eased off, even a little, the other mutant would quickly break free. Made sense, damn it, that a creature of such obscene bulk would have muscles to match; how else could he move, how else could he get his heart and circulatory system to function properly?

  Then Colossus was there, landing a single punch to Phat’s jaw that broke the foot-thick encasement of ice as if it were nothing, and still connected with power enough to shatter the mutant’s consciousness before he hit the ground.

  The big Russian turned at once to aid Kitty, who really didn’t need it against the woman with the axe. Time and again, the woman slashed her blade through the girl’s ghostly body without doing the slightest harm, while Kitty bobbed and weaved and backpedaled until she came within Peter’s reach.

  A single backhand, not even full force, knocked the woman twenty feet and out of the fight.

  There were a couple of quick glances from side to side and the briefest exchange of smiles back to Logan, who acknowledged that they were doing well.

  At Logan’s signal to the lieutenant, the soldiers moved onto the scene, taking the fallen mutants into custody.

  Up on the bridge, Pyro glared across the way at Bobby, chomping at the bit to confront his former roommate.

  Magneto would have none of it.

  “Not yet,” he said to the young man, in a tone that allowed neither argument nor defiance. “Stay by my side.”

  Instead, Magneto turned to the Juggernaut.

  “Mr. Marko,” he called out. “You have the coordinates from Callisto. The boy we seek is in the main cell house.” He pointed to the very top of the Rock. “Up there. Get inside. Find the boy. Kill him.”

  Age didn’t matter, the fact that he was a mutant didn’t matter—no more than it had when he was prepared to sacrifice Rogue years before at Liberty Island. If it was necessary for the cause, that was all that mattered to Magneto.

  As for Cain Marko, he really couldn’t care less. He just loved to smash things.

  Buildings were fun, people better—and X-Men would be best of all.

  He dropped his head, angling his torso forward as best he could so that his conical helmet appeared a bit like a massive cannon shell plowing through the air. The sloping roadway allowed him to build up a decent amount of speed, and he was fairly confident that nothing below would be able to even slow him down, much less bring him to a halt.

  Squads of troopers were the first to fall, solid hits that made him feel the same satisfaction as when he threw a strike in bowling, with bodies flying as wildly as tenpins.

  A Humvee rolled from cover and deployed its water cannon, which had about as much effect as a kid’s water pistol. Juggernaut struck the vehicle more solidly than any battering ram, shattering it on contact and bouncing all the bits and pieces off the surrounding walls.

  Logan popped his claws, figuring they might do some good against the onrushing giant—what good was unstoppable momentum if you had no legs left to run with?—but he was at the wrong end of the yard, with too many bodies to fight between him and Juggernaut.

  Colossus was much closer, and he made the interception on his own, without a signal from the others, setting himself right in the charging man’s path.

  Juggernaut accepted the challenge and picked up his pace. Peter set himself, and cocked a fist.

  He threw a great punch, but it never got the chance to land. Juggernaut body-slammed him right off his feet, turning the massive strength of the X-Man against his teammates, deflecting the armored Russian into a nearby wall that was already on its last bricks, forcing Beast to scramble to yank Iceman clear as the entire edifice crashed to the ground.

  By then, of course, he was on his way to the cell house.

  “He’s going for the boy,” McCoy yelled.

  “Not if I get there first,” Kitty
yelled back over her shoulder, for she’d started running the moment Juggernaut bounced Colossus aside.

  Juggernaut couldn’t be stopped. Neither could she—only she was a lot less messy about it. Kitty phased straight into the body of the rocky island, and the hill that formed the foundation of the cell house.

  Warren Worthington Jr., gun in hand, and Kavita Rao were running for their lives, and for the future. She was terrified—because they were in a headlong flight towards the sounds of battle, rather than away, scrambling through the rotted, shadowy warrens of the old prison in a desperate attempt to reach Jimmy’s room and take him with them.

  “We need…to get…the boy,” Worthington spat out between gasps, as his body mercilessly reminded him of the twin tolls of age and the good life. He’d thought himself in perfectly fine shape, only to have the last few minutes puncture that balloon forever.

  Not so far away, and coming closer, he could hear a series of hollow booms, followed by the shush of collapsing masonry; it made him think someone was taking a wrecking ball to the building. Didn’t much like the sound of that.

  “There he is,” came a shout from a gallery overhead.

  Before they could move, find an escape, bring the gun to bear, the mutants were upon them, led by Kid Omega. Kavita shrieked in reflexive terror as the three mutants—Psylocke, Arclight, and Kid Omega—surrounded them.

  “You’re the guy that invented the ‘cure,’ am I right?” the female known as Psylocke demanded.

  Worthington faced her, surprised to discover that while he was scared almost out of his mind, it didn’t really show. Outwardly, he appeared altogether calm.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I am.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, displaying a gorgeous smile that was filled with both mischief and menace.