X-Men(tm) The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  He was flying.

  His heart pounded in his chest, pushing blood through his body like rivers of molten flame, searing him from crown to toes to the tips of fingers. He believed he was burning up, yet knew as well, with that same irrational certainty, that he’d be all right. This was where he belonged.

  He was flying!

  That deserved a cheer, and he gave one he hoped was loud enough for all the Bay Area to hear.

  He didn’t know where he was going, and he had no clothes, no cash, no ID—but it didn’t matter. All he could say for sure was that he probably wasn’t ever going home again.

  The rest, he prayed, would take care of itself.

  He was flying!

  He passed the Worthington Research Facility, so high and so quickly that he was barely seen—save by one.

  Jimmy’s attention had been caught by the strange new shape up in the sky, and he watched without consideration of what it might be or what this might mean. He’d never seen anything so beautiful, ever, and was content to pass the time, however fleeting, simply enjoying it.

  “Let me out of here,” bellowed President Cockrum, shackled at wrists and ankles and waist, and fastened to a bar that extended the length of the cell, allowing minimal freedom of movement—basically a traverse from cot to toilet to table. “Goddamn it, do you know who I am?”

  He stood in the last of a line of cells, each holding its own single prisoner bound by a complex and formidable array of restraints. A hall ran the length of the single-tiered cellblock, with a fully enclosed guard station at front and rear. The entire enclosure rocked and trembled as though on moveable springs, and the air was filled with a faint and pervasive hum. It was night, and after lights-out, so the cells were mainly defined by shadow.

  The guard flicked on the light for the last cell, and keyed in the feed for the master security station, plus the satellite uplink. He didn’t deviate from protocol, no matter how annoying or trivial the provocation. He was a trained professional, ex-military. This installation was operated jointly by the departments of Homeland Security and Mutant Affairs, with some help from the United States Marshals Service. The Bureau of Prisons had learned, to its sorrow, the ultimate and tragic cost of incarcerating prisoners like Magneto, after the destruction of the Mount Haven complex during his escape, and the execution of its entire complement of guards and staff. This was intended as an interim solution until a more secure facility was constructed. Now, however, with the introduction of the Worthington serum—and pending the usual avalanche of injunctions, appeals and courtroom motions—places like this, specialized prisons to hold mutant inmates, could well end up like Alcatraz Island, once the most fearsome penal institution in the land, now obsolete, good for nothing but a local tourist attraction and the occasional movie set.

  Twisting his mouth in irritation at a sudden, inexplicable smear of static across his display screens, which messed up his view of the cell, the guard finished his reports and took a stroll along the catwalk for a closer look.

  The president was in fine form: “I’m the president of the United States.”

  Tough luck, asshole, thought the guard, enjoying the moment. I sure as shit didn’t vote for you.

  “I demand that you release me!”

  “Mr. President, sir,” he replied with unexpected good humor, “shut the hell up.”

  He was finished here, but as he started back along the catwalk, his hand stayed light and ready on the butt of the weapon holstered at his side. He was rated Expert with a pistol, and before reporting to this new station had spent a couple weeks of refresher training with the FBI. He could draw and fire with a speed that would have left Billy the Kid stunned, and shoot with more precision than that legendary pistolero ever possessed.

  “Please,” came a new cry from the same cell, but a little girl this time. “Please, I haven’t done anything, it’s all a big mistake, I’m not supposed to be here—please let me go.”

  He glanced back in, and saw a kid who looked like she’d been snatched from her First Communion, as innocent as could be. She’d somehow taken the place of the president.

  It was late, near the end of a double shift, and he was tired. The guard spoke from the heart, without thinking of the consequences.

  “Keep it up, Mystique, I’m gonna spray you in the face, bitch!” For emphasis, he brandished a can of pepper spray—while his gun hand never strayed far from the pistol on his belt.

  The girl responded with a smile that was way too wicked for someone her age, and with an equally unlikely come-hither look, whispered, “When I get out of here, I’m going to kill you myself.”

  “That’ll be the damn day,” he muttered, although he was tempted to draw his weapon and take a shot, just to see what would happen.

  The guard followed proper procedure and walked away, while behind him in the cell, the little girl shifted position, her body elongating, maturing, losing its clothes, turning a deep cobalt blue. For Mystique, nothing ventured, nothing gained. This ploy had worked before, so it was certainly worth the try. It had also told her something important: this guard was smarter than most, more careful than most, and surprisingly, more considerate than most. The threat had merely been an expression of frustration. He’d likely been dozing when her bellowing called him back to duty. Most guards she’d known would have sprayed her just for spite; he’d simply made the threat.

  On the whole, a pretty decent guy.

  But she’d kill him just the same.

  Inside the cellblock, clocks and lighting conspired to convince the inmates that it was the middle of the night. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

  They were incarcerated in a supersemi, a double-length tractor trailer, cruising the back roads of heartland America.

  In the beginning, and for as long as it worked, it had been an inspired idea. With the destruction of Mount Haven, the federal government had nowhere to hold superpowered prisoners. Every attempt to establish a replacement led to an acute attack of NIMBY—Not in my backyard, goddamn it!—on the part of all the governors approached, as they proceeded to wrap themselves in the mantle of states’ rights. Given what happened last time, it was hard to argue the point, especially when it came to someone as personally and professionally valuable to Magneto as Mystique. That’s when the idea was pitched for a mobile prison.

  There were a helluva lot of roads in the contiguous Forty-Eight, and a helluva lot of trucks. This wasn’t searching for a needle in a haystack, it was searching for precisely the right needle. One that was constantly on the move, and thoroughly shielded against Magneto’s magnetic scans. He could be standing right beside the truck and never sense Mystique’s biosignature. The number crunchers ran the probabilities of discovery and came up with a number in the billions.

  How were they to know Magneto would cheat?

  The first anyone was aware of it was when every vehicle in the convoy started shaking itself apart at the seams, and every electronic instrument started bugging out big-time.

  The duty officer slapped the panic button, never realizing that his signal was degraded the moment it left the antenna.

  That’s when Magneto stepped out into the middle of the road.

  The escort drivers floored their accelerators, hoping for a chance at running him down. With a casual flick of the wrist, he sent both armored Suburbans tumbling end-over-end off the road. Same applied to the after-guard.

  The supersemi driver stomped on his brakes in a futile effort to save himself as the cab was torn from the trailer and pitched through the air, soaring the length of a football field before crashing to the road in a ball of fire and torn metal.

  Momentum kept the trailers coming, although the front end, deprived of the cab’s support, crashed down to the pavement and started sending up an impressive rooster-tail of sparks.

  Magneto stood his ground, as casual as if this was merely a Sunday stroll through the park. As the lead trailer approached, he simply crushed it, letting the screams of tortured
steel absorb those of the living inside.

  By the time it stopped at his feet, he’d reduced a twenty-meter container to the size of a shoe box, while the second trailer, the longer one containing the prisoners, was altogether intact.

  The moment the alarm sounded, the guard ran for his station, but the sudden disengagement of the cab and the destruction of the lead trailer left his partner sprawled on the monitor console, shocked unconscious by a massive series of short circuits as Magneto overloaded the internal security systems and the comnet. The guard himself was tossed to the catwalk right at the rear, by Mystique’s cell.

  Knowing things would only get worse and that his chances of making it out of this alive were almost nonexistent, he grabbed for his sidearm regardless. He was a trained professional and he had a responsibility. The guard had sworn an oath.

  That oath was his epitaph. Mystique snaked her legs through a ridiculously tiny breach in the wall of her cell, twisting her malleable form through some impossible gyrations, making herself as boneless as an anaconda so her feet could find and embrace the guard’s neck.

  He felt her touch, heard her laugh…

  …and she broke his neck.

  “Told you so,” she said, extending her toes to the length of a chopstick, and using them to hook the keys from his belt and bring them back to her.

  Magneto made his way to the back of the prison truck, where he was joined by Pyro and Callisto, who’d dealt with the last of the escort. Beneath the façade of what appeared to be ordinary truck doors was a second level that would have done a bank vault proud, secured by a series of massive, high-tech locks. The entire body of the vehicle was composed of nonferrous ceramic composites, both lighter and significantly stronger than any metal this side of pure adamantium. Magneto cocked an eyebrow at the inventiveness of the design, reminded of a piece of information gleaned by Mystique some while back, that there was a mutant inventor working for DARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research and Planning Agency, known only by the code name Forge. If this was Forge’s work, that made him—or her—a force to be reckoned with, on a par with Xavier himself.

  He brought his thoughts back to the business. He couldn’t affect the fabric of the truck directly, and suspected that the armored shell would withstand any modification he might make to the escort vehicles—which were made of steel—to use them to breach the walls. He permitted himself a smile. Did they truly think him such a simpleton? Did they think that in the decades his powers had been active he hadn’t devoted a substantial portion of his life to researching all there was to know about the nature and properties of magnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of Creation itself?

  He attacked the truck directly, but on a subatomic level, refining his perceptions to the point where the world was no longer composed of tangible, readily identifiable objects, but instead flash points of energy, lines of force. It wasn’t easy, and here he cursed the ravages of time, wishing he’d had such a level of insight at an age when he’d been hale enough to utilize it properly. A slight reshuffle of the alignment of atoms within a molecule, molecules within a lattice, and presto!

  What had been unbreachable was now as brittle as rice paper.

  With a confident smile, he restored his perceptions to normal, then reached up to the nearest lock, giving a hearty tug—and the whole door popped off its hinges.

  Callisto caught it as it fell, and tossed it aside with an ease and power that revealed an impressive physical strength. Magneto filed this information away for future reference.

  Mystique was standing in the doorway, and at the sight of him she struck one of her more delicious poses, radiating irresistible temptation and intolerable insolence, all in the same sultry look.

  “About time,” she chided.

  He answered with a thin smile, “I’ve been busy, my dear.” She ignored the veiled reprimand because she was clearly happy to see him, telling him so with a smile. Which he didn’t answer.

  “Did you find what we were looking for?”

  She nodded, and the smile went away.

  “The source of the cure is a mutant, code-named Leech. A child at the Worthington Labs in Berkeley. Without him, they have nothing.”

  Magneto took a moment to consider what she’d told him, and then decided to acknowledge the tumult coming from the other cells.

  “And who do we have here,” he mused aloud, eyeing a clipboard on the catwalk and using a minor burst of power to toss it into Pyro’s grasp.

  “Read off the guest list, if you please.”

  As they made their away along the catwalk, John Allerdyce flipped to the appropriate page.

  “James Madrox,” he announced, at the cell next to Mystique’s.

  “This one robbed seven banks,” she told them. “At the same time.”

  “His mutant name is…” Pyro began.

  “Multiple Man,” finished the voice within the cell.

  Magneto popped the lock and a normal-looking young man—dark hair, average height, athletic build—rose to his feet.

  “I could use a man of your talents,” Magneto told him.

  As Madrox approached, he stepped momentarily through a pool of deep shadow, and just that quickly, between one step and the next, he was leading a column of identical duplicates, all of whom responded to Magneto with a different expression or greeting, establishing their innate individuality. They were all cut from the same cloth, so to speak, but they could apparently operate independently.

  “What they know, I know,” Madrox boasted. “What they learn, I remember.”

  With a glance at her nails, Mystique asked innocently, “And if they’re hurt, do you feel it? If you’re knocked out, do they stick around?”

  The multitude of sour expressions was all the answer they needed. Magneto understood the limitations, but repeated his invitation regardless.

  “I’m in,” Madrox told them, in a chorus of eager voices.

  “Splendid,” Magneto acknowledged. “Welcome to the Brotherhood.”

  The next cage was massively reinforced, with huge locks for emphasis. Magneto peeked through the small access port.

  “Careful with this one,” Mystique cautioned.

  Shackled to a chair, complete with head restraint, was the largest figure Magneto had ever seen, more impressive than Sabretooth, far more so than the X-Man Colossus in his armored form. A veritable mutant behemoth.

  “Cain Marko,” Mystique announced, prompting a wry sidewards glance of bemusement from Magneto. She shrugged back as if to say, not her fault, she certainly hadn’t christened him.

  “Solitary confinement,” Pyro told them, reading from the file. “Zero contact. Check this out.” His voice rose in excitement, reminding Magneto that he was still a lot younger than he liked people to think. “‘Prisoner must remain inert at all times. If he builds up any momentum, he becomes virtually unstoppable.’”

  “How fascinating,” said Magneto, and proceeded to open the cell.

  “What do they call you?” he asked, once inside.

  “Juggernaut,” was the reply.

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  The huge truck creaked ominously as Juggernaut propelled himself from his chair. As he reached down for his helmet, Pyro couldn’t resist a jibe.

  “Nice helmet.”

  Juggernaut looked at the boy as if he were a bug about to be squashed. “Keeps my face pretty.”

  Pyro had sense enough to leave things at that.

  The remaining cells were empty.

  As they exited the truck, no one noticed a stir on the monitor console. Hermán Molina knew the safe play, the smart play, was to stay right where he was and do nothing. But he’d earned his six stripes in the Marine Corps, and the Navy Cross, as the hardest of hard chargers. Being assigned as security for this run wasn’t a dead-end job for losers who couldn’t cut it elsewhere—they had recruited the best of the best, and drummed into them from the get-go how vital their responsibility was, how dangerous thei
r charges were.

  Now the three prisoners were not only loose, but they were walking out with Magneto. Something had to be done, and after taking a glance around, it was plain that he’d drawn the short straw.

  He was a first-tier sniper, as deadly accurate with a pistol as a rifle. But the range was too great; he had to get closer.

  Mystique caught the green dot of a laser sight out of the corner of her eye, centered on Magneto’s back. They were too far apart to push him clear and there was no time to yell a warning as she registered the faint thip of a weapon discharging.

  She dove forward, and felt a sting between her breasts as the dart struck home.

  Magneto whirled about, saw the guard tracking to take a second shot, and instantly manipulated magnetic fields around him, popping the plastic weapon from his grasp as though it were a wet and slippery bar of soap. He brought it carefully to rest, making sure the barrel was pointed well away from everyone present. A second later there was an awful shriek from inside the truck, mercifully cut short, accompanied by a rush of heat and smoke from a fireball so instantly powerful it managed to stagger him. Pyro’s doing.

  The young man pulled the flames back into himself, leaving only the charred and stinking remnants of the guard. Magneto turned in frantic concern to Mystique.

  Mystique wasn’t interested in what was happening around her. She had problems of her own. It was asthough she’d been stabbed by a spear of ice, and a cold more intense than anything she ever imagined radiated outwards from the point of contact, behind a wave front of such agony that she found herself hammered to hands and knees on the ground. Without any conscious direction, her body curled in on itself, impossibly tight, returning instinctively to the fetal position as—in a very real sense—she was being remade and reborn.