Salvation

by Unknown Author

  With a heavy sigh and a shake of his head, the Juggernaut tossed the signal pole to one side. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, then flicked both hands in a dismissive gesture and turned to walk away.

  “Forget it,” he said, and moved south, heading out of the city.

  Rogue turned to look at Cyclops and Jean, who were staring at her, mouths open wide.

  “How did you know?” Scott asked.

  “We attacked him,” she explained. “Marko’s not a mutant, remember?”

  Cyclops slapped himself on the forehead. Jean looked at Rogue, then turned to gaze thoughtfully at the Juggernaut’s retreating form.

  “Cain,” she called after him. “Cain, wait up a moment, would you?”

  Jean started walking after him, and Cyclops and Rogue fell in behind her a moment later.

  “What is it now?” Marko growled. “I thought we were done with our little ‘chat.’ ”

  “You want to walk away from a fight with the X-Men?” Cyclops pushed. “That’s a first, I’d say.”

  “It ain’t you, Summers,” the Juggernaut barked. “I got no fear of my little stepbrother’s mutie encounter group. You chumps have tried time after time to take me out of the game, and I’m still here, ain’t I?”

  He looked particularly pleased with himself.

  “Then why?” Rogue asked.

  “Ah, hell,” Cain Marko said, rolling his eyes. “I guess you guys aren’t gonna leave me alone, are ya?”

  The X-Men were silent.

  “Nah, didn’t think so. Look, I came into Manhattan a couple nights ago to meet this lady . . . and, yeah, the Juggernaut gets dates now and then. She wants to get together the next night, so I stayed another night in the hotel. Then, just before

  dawn, the world goes all to hell. It’s a good thing I brought my gear. Things didn’t work out with my ladyfriend, and I just wanted to go home. But, noooooo!”

  “Magneto came after you?” Cyclops asked.

  Juggernaut laughed.

  “Not in the way you mean, Summers. A couple of his little stormtroopers got up in my face, gave me a hard time about joining ‘the cause’ when all I wanted to do was go home. Then these two German boneheads start in on me, twins they were—’ ’ .

  “The Kleinstocks,” Jean said.

  ‘ ‘Whatever,” Marko said with a wave of his hand. ‘ ‘Magneto’s toy soldiers were all over me.”

  “But you ain’t a mutant,” Rogue said.

  Marko raised an eyebrow. “No kidding. But the morons wouldn’t listen. I had to get a little mean with them. And they’re like guard dogs, once they get their teeth in, they don’t let go until you take them down. Once they saw I meant to leave, and I told them another dozen times I wasn’t a mutant, they gave up. Helped that they could barely stand, and that I explained as how me an’ Charley Xavier ain’t blood related.”

  Uncomfortable silence followed. Rogue looked back and forth between Juggernaut and Cyclops. Finally, the huge man shook his head slightly, his helmet rotating slowly from side to side.

  “Well,” he said, “not like I actually expected an apology or anything. You guys still want to fight?”

  “Hmm?” Cyclops asked, as though just returning to a conversation he’d tuned out. And Rogue thought that maybe he had.

  “No,” Jean said quickly. “No, we don’t.”

  “Suit yourself,” Marko said with a shrug, then turned and began to walk south once more.

  “Wait!” Rogue said, and glanced at Cyclops and Jean, whose face was creased in an incredulous frown.

  “What?” the Juggernaut asked.

  “Stay,” she said. “We could use the help.”

  Once again the other X-Men looked at Rogue with incredulity. Juggernaut only laughed.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “If I wasn’t going to help Magneto, what the hell makes you think I’d help you?”

  “You ain’t payin’ attention, are you?” Rogue asked, hand on hip. “Listen up, Marko, maybe I won’t have to explain myself twice.”

  “Um, Rogue,” Jean said tentatively, “I’m not even sure why you’d want to, but if you’re trying to endear yourself to the Juggernaut, that may not be the best way to—”

  “No, Jean, I’m not tryin’ to make friends with Mr. Marko,” Rogue snapped. “He’s been a pain since the first time the X-Men laid eyes on him.”

  She rounded on the Juggernaut and started to advance. Wide eyed with surprise, he did not attempt to defend himself. There was no need. Rogue’s attack was all verbal.

  “Thing is, though, you ain’t evil, Cain. You’re just one mean sucker,” she said harshly. “Try to follow me, here. It’s the X-Men versus Magneto, the Sentinels, and however many mutants he’s got under his thumb already, not to mention whatever others may be on the way. We’re working at less than half our strength, and we’re flat-out exhausted to boot.

  “If we lose, and it don’t look like we got much chance of winnin’, there’s two ways this thing can go. First, New York City ends up gettin' nuked, ’cause you know the army can’t beat Magneto. Maybe you don’t care about all the people in the city dyin’ like that, but I’ve got a feelin’ you ain’t as unfeelin’ as you make out.

  “Second—and you’ll like this—Magneto wins, and the Mutant Empire expands faster and faster until the entire Earth has been remade. You’ll be bowin’ and scrapin’ before Emperor Magnus in no time, bein’ as how you were so insistent upon provin’ that you weren’t one of us.”

  Cain Marko looked from one face to the next. From Rogue, to Jean, to Scott. Rogue wasn’t sure what he was searching for, maybe some confirmation that they all believed what she had said.

  “I’ve got friends here, in the city,” he said, almost absently.

  “Not for long,” Rogue answered.

  The Juggernaut took several steps forward, until he was standing, towering, over Cyclops. Marko looked down at the leader of the X-Men, eyes hard inside his mask.

  “What about it, Summers?” he asked. “This all for real? Your team gonna get trounced here today?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility,” Cyclops reluctantly agreed.

  “I don’t like you, Summers,” the Juggernaut said.

  “The feeling’s entirely mutual, Marko.”

  Juggernaut looked around again, at Rogue, then Jean, then back at Cyclops. He put out his hand.

  “Just as long as we understand each other.”

  It was wrong. All wrong.

  Once upon a time, the Worthington family had been Manhattan royalty. Richer than God, they’d been. Yet as a boy Warren had been blissfully unaware of the harsh realities life held for others. Little things like being forced to go to bed without supper—for so minute a transgression as drawing on his father’s favorite tie with magic markers—those had been the sum total of his childhood hardships.

  Then came the wings. Warren had blossomed early, hitting puberty at the tender age of eleven. At first, his parents had terrified him with their own fears, that the growths on his back might be some form of cancer. Soon enough, it became plain to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention exactly what those growths were.

  Mother had always called him her little angel. She’d no way of knowing that term of endearment would one day prove prophetic.

  He had to admire his parents’ fortitude, though. With an inside track on all the latest research—because after all, knowledge was power and Warren K. Worthington Jr. had enough money to buy whatever power he ever needed—his father had determined that little Warren III was a mutant. He paid all the doctors a fortune in hush money, including the man who’d devised the truss that held Warren’s wings flat against his back.

  His father, Warren had long since determined, had just wanted it all to go away. If the wings weren’t seen, they weren’t really there. The Worthington family could go on with their business dynasty as if they were unaware of their son’s genetic status. Warren grew up to be a playboy, just as his father had expecte
d. But in the privacy of his own home, in his own room, away from the stigma society placed on mutants, the stigma his own parents, by their silence, had placed on him, he unfurled his beautiful wings and dreamed of flying.

  He dreamed of it until one day he couldn’t stop himself. And Warren Worthington III, his mother’s little angel, flew.

  Not long thereafter he was packed off to Xavier’s School

  for Gifted Youngsters. The next time he toid his parents he loved them was the day he wept over their graves.

  But while his father had been alive, he had shown his mutant son all the wonders of Manhattan, the curious behavior of the city’s idle rich. New York City belonged to the captains of industry, he would always say. The wealthy families that were the power behind every company and politician in the region. Like the Worthingtons.

  Warren had never understood the attitude of ownership, but he did value Manhattan for everything it had. When others complained of the homelessness, the crime, the corruption, Warren used his family’s money to do what he could in those areas. But in doing so, he constantly reminded anyone who would listen that New York was the greatest city in the world.

  But now it was all wrong. He glided between old four- and five-story buildings, biometallic razor wings slicing the air, wounding the sky. Once, he’d been an angel, ivory feathers floating, muscles powering him aloft. His new wings matched his altered nature, violent and incisive. He had begun to gain control over the violence that raged within him, but he could never bring back the natural wings that had been mutilated, then amputated.

  Something about Archangel would never be right again. Now his city was twisted as well. It looked the same on the outside, but its soul was being drained away, with every person fleeing in terror.

  A rare trace of birdsong lilted through the air above. A nice breeze spared him a moment of the stagnant, superheated air that hung in the city’s concrete canyons. The sun shone down, glinting off display windows and forcing him to squint. It should have been a perfect New York City day.

  But New York City had all but disappeared. The rude, stressed-out tribe that called Manhattan home had been thinned nearly to nothing to make room for a new tribe, a dangerous tribe. That was the way of the wild, but it didn’t sit right with him. This wasn’t the wild, after all. More than anywhere else, for better or for worse, Manhattan island was civilization.

  Or had been. Now it was wild again. The structure of civilization still stood, but rather than brimming with life, it was filled with the terrified and the terrifying, lurking in doorways and subway stations and narrow alleys.

  It was wrong. All wrong.

  They had already checked out two Sentinels, the robots that stood guard over the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, respectively, on the western shore of the island. Cooper had said before that there was no visible marking to identify the Sentinels, but had not mentioned that there were markings. She had brought infrared goggles in her gear from Washington for that specific purpose.

  It would have been a stroke of true luck if one of those Sentinels had turned out to be the Alpha unit. But they just weren’t that lucky. Now, Archangel winged his way above, acting as point man and scout, while Gambit and Cooper navigated abandoned cars, cabs, buses, and trucks on the streets below on a motorcycle they’d come upon just beyond the Manhattan-side mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

  Gambit had it hot-wired in seconds, literally. Watching him, Warren had realized for the first time that all the talk of Remy LeBeau having been an international master thief before joining the X-Men had been one hundred percent truth. It made him wonder, not for the first time, how much of Gambit’s past was still a total mystery to the X-Men.

  On the other hand, nobody fought harder than Remy LeBeau. For all his sarcasm, Warren figured Gambit was a good man to have at his back.

  Greenwich Village was beneath him now, and the buildings had gotten even shorter. No skyscrapers down here. Offices, warehouses, retail space, that was the old city. The face of this part of the city changed from day to day, new restaurants and boutiques opening as last month’s hot spots closed.

  Almost directly south, he could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center jutting up next to Battery Park City. Beyond them, over blocks of buildings of every shape and size, Archangel could see the head of the next Sentinel. Canal Street heading southeast and West Street running south were packed with vehicles, so Gambit guided the Harley down Greenwich Street.

  They’d already passed several small groups of humans, even a couple of people who appeared, courageously, to be out on their own. Warren figured they were trying to discover how much the city had actually changed. They barely blinked when Gambit and Cooper drove by, but the few who spotted Archangel in the air definitely reacted. Some ran for cover, others threw whatever was at hand, still others merely pointed in fear or astonishment.

  It didn’t matter that they had decided to stay in the city despite Magneto’s rule, these people were not prepared for it. Many of them would die if Magneto were left in charge. The X-Men were not about to allow that to happen.

  “Swing over to Broadway when you have a chance,” he said into the comm-link on his left wrist. “From there it’s a straight shot down to Battery Park. Looks like that’s where Robby the Robot is hanging out.”

  “Check,” Cooper responded.

  “Val, there are twenty of these bad boys, and we’ve only checked out two,” Warren said, concerned. “It’s going to take a while. Isn’t there any other way to do this?”

  “Not unless you can carry me on a flying circuit of the whole island, Warren,” Cooper responded. “No way would we get an airship or a chopper in here, buzz around Manhattan, without Magneto and his goons taking notice, and action.” Archangel sighed. Cooper was right.

  “All right,” he answered. “Tell me again where they’re all located. We may have to split up if we don’t get lucky in the next hour or so.”

  “We did the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel,” she answered. “We thought the next one was the downtown heliport, but you said Battery Park, so that’s two. Brooklyn Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Midtown Tunnel, UN Building, Queensboro Bridge, Metro Hospital Center, Triborough Bridge.”

  She stopped, presumably to take a breath and rack her brain.

  “There’s one in Harlem in the one-forties, one at the Cross Bronx, one at the Henry Hudson, the GW Bridge, then four more along Riverside Park facing Jersey.”

  She paused.

  “Warren?”

  “Pray for luck, Val,” he said. “We’re gonna need it.”

  On the street, the Harley swung east. They were past the Village now, rapidly approaching the financial district. With one thrust of his wings, Warren also turned east, speeding up to get ahead of them, to do his duty as the point man. But he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

  “Heads up, Remy,” he said. “Activity ahead, by City Hall.” . .

  They were coming up on City Hall fast, and the street was filled with people. More people than Warren had seen in one spot since entering Manhattan, maybe more people than he’d imagined had stayed behind. But these folks weren’t kowtowing to Magneto. They were fighting for their city.

  There were hundreds of them, the true melting pot of New York, crossing every imaginary boundary people put between them, race, gender, religion, age, income. TTiey were New Yorkers first and there to fight. Problem was, they were losing.

  On the steps of City Hall, police officers and mutants stood side by side, keeping the citizens out. Warren recognized several of the mutants, including Senyaka, an Acolyte in the colorful uniform all of Magneto’s inner circle wore. Even as he looked on, Senyaka lashed out with his psionic whip and began to choke one of the men closing in on the cops. The others began to back off.

  “My God,” Archangel said, then spoke into the comm again. “Magneto’s co-opted City Hall, Val. We’ve got cops and Acolytes working together. These people don’t have a chance.”

  “Bac
k off, Warren!” Val’s panicked voice erupted from the comm-link. “Get out of sight immediately. Don’t let them see you!”

  “What?” Archangel asked. “What are you—”

  “La petite fille is right, man ami,” Gambit interrupted, the roar of the Harley coming through the link with his heavily accented voice. “Gambit don’ like it any better den you, but we can’t afford to have Magneto and de Acolytes down on us now. We got a job to do.”

  Warren ground his teeth together, took one last look at the chaos at City Hall, and turned away, heading for cover at top speed. In an instant he was gone, and he didn’t think anyone had seen him.

  “Let’s get this done,” he said into the comm.

  Yet he knew that no matter how lucky they were, no matter how quickly they might get the job done, the city would be deeply scarred. The psychological scars on the population were a part of it, but there was no way this thing was going to end without some serious collateral damage.

  Gambit had turned the Harley down Church Street, only a block away from the City Hall madness. Archangel swiftly followed, catching up as they passed the spires of Trinity Church. Several blocks farther south, Gambit swung left for a block, then turned south onto Broadway. The green lawn of Battery Park was just ahead.

  Archangel held back, not wanting to gain more attention from the Sentinel than was absolutely necessary. Now that he saw it, standing its silent, deadly vigil at the southern tip of the island, he realized how vital that particular spot was.

  From Battery Park, ferries ran to and from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Close by was the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry. Far more important, however, were the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the downtown heliport, and Fort Jay, the U.S. Coast Guard station on Governors Island, just a short way across the Upper New York Bay.

  It occurred to him then that Magneto was very serious about his plans for Haven. His behavior had been eminently reasonable, and insane at the same time. He truly believed that Haven would be able to function with the rest of the world. If he’d thought the island would have to be completely self-sufficient, he’d have ordered the Sentinels to simply destroy the bridges and tunnels and be done with it.