Law of the Jungle

by Unknown Author

  He began singing “Row, row, row your boat.”

  The X-Men stared back at him.

  “Oh, come now. That’s not the spirit!” Sauron raised a hand, holding Ka-Zar’s confiscated knife like a conductor’s baton. “Everyone. I insist.”

  Psylocke sensed hypnotic commands invading her psyche. She knew how to fight, but also knew that she would lose in the end, and the effort would only deplete her. Instead, she began to sing, doing so just haltingly enough that Sauron, if he didn’t check too closely, would think she was doing so against her will.

  Warren joined in the chorus, aware of her reasons for cooperating, playing the part of the weak-minded opponent Sauron considered him to be.

  But Storm and Wolverine pressed their mouths shut. As expected, this drew the core of the villain’s anger and scrutiny down upon them. Excellent, Psylocke thought. She would have winked conspiratorially at them if she had dared.

  “No good at all!” Sauron yelled. He stepped directly in front of Storm. She clenched her eyes shut, but he forced them open without physically touching her. He placed his huge orbs in front of her face and commanded aloud, “Sing! Sing the round!”

  “ ‘Row your boat’ into a whirlpool!” Storm snapped. The muscles of her neck stood out, denying him the surrender he was demanding, but already her words had adhered slightly to the tune. He leaned nearer. Psylocke, even with dampened powers, could see the cascade of ethereal energy pouring from Sauron into his victim.

  Storm began to sing. “Row ... row ...” She swallowed hard. “Row your...” She resisted until the end of the lyric, but at the word “dream,” her lips parted and refused to close. At first she mouthed the words, then they emerged in a whisper, and finally she sang at full volume. Only an occasional shift of tone betrayed the uncooperativeness seething inside her.

  Sauron turned toward Wolverine. “Now, my Canadian basso prof undo” he proclaimed, “let us hear your contribution!”

  Logan opened his mouth, and belched.

  Sauron glared at him. “Try again.”

  Logan narrowed his eyes, a feral grin forming below. “I only sing when I’m drunk, bub.”

  Sauron chuckled. The “bub” had echoed at the same beat as “row row row.”

  “Very well,” the monster chirped. “Be drunk.” Wolverine limbs and body went slack. His eyes unfocused. He hiccupped.

  “Row, row, row your boat,” Sauron sang.

  “Throw, throw, throw yer goat,” Logan sang merrily in a voice Psylocke had only heard the times he and Havok had tried to drink each other under the table. Thanks to his healing factor, Logan could drink an entire fifth of that ghastly Russian vodka of his in an hour and still stand up and walk away.

  “Almost,” Sauron declared. “You will get the lyrics right. I will tell you if and when you may improvise.”

  Logan grimaced. Psylocke knew the pain of such prolonged resistance was excruciating; the psychic maelstrom around his head was vivid and so unstable snakes of compulsion were radiating outward. Even the guards were humming the tune now.

  Gruffly and unmelodiously, he sang. Sauron nodded, wove the tendrils of command tightly into place, and turned to his remaining captives.

  .. “Ah, my poor Lord and Lady Plunder,” he trilled. “How rude to snore during our performance. Wake up, my dears.”

  He snapped his fingers. Ka-Zar and Shanna’s eyes blinked open. They raised bleary heads and took in their surroundings, expressions hardening as they spotted their tormentor.

  “Sing with us,” Sauron told them.

  They clenched their teeth and tried to stifle the action of their vocal cords, but they lasted mere seconds. Psylocke could see in their auras what great natural mental resistance they possessed, but it did them little good at the moment. Sauron was at his mightiest, they were at their weakest— they wouldn’t even be conscious yet if he weren’t propping them up psychically.

  Wolverine began garbling the lyrics. Sauron whirled and stalked back to him, finally demonstrating impatience. So, thought Psylocke, controlling so many at once is not the casual trick he pretends it is. Taking advantage of the diversion, Psylocke sent out a quick telepathic burst of reassurance to Ka-Zar. She had no time or strength to get across a verbal message—a mere pulse of friendliness and presence was all she could manage.

  She sensed his mind open and envelope her offering. He glanced toward her, his scowl softening into the silver-tongued-devil glance he had blessed her with back in the Fall People village. A wave of warmth blossomed between her lungs.

  Reaching Shanna proved difficult. The She-Devil’s mental locks were well constructed. Psylocke recognized the signs of an individual who had known tragedy at vulnerable points in life. The barriers thickened against Psylocke’s probe.

  Elisabeth Braddock had been a telepath too many years to batter clumsily and futilely at a volatile target. Instead, she rested her astral tendril against the wall and waited.

  The rigidity of the wall did not fade. But bit by bit, as Psylocke held back and didn’t push, a counterprobe emerged and tentatively nudged the tendril.

  Connection. Psylocke broadcast a gentle message of greeting and all’s-well. Shanna gave a little jump. Then some of the tension vanished from her posture. She darted a glance at Betsy and smiled, eyes only in order to conceal the communication from enemy observation.

  Back along the link came emotions of gratitude, counterreassurance, and camaraderie.

  Well, well, well, she thought. Not so fiery a vixen at all, if you approached her right.

  Psylocke withdrew into herself, hoarding her remaining reserves, little as they were. Any more effort right now might deplete her so much she would begin screaming from the insipidness of that ridiculous song. Brainchild, she noted, had stuffed wax into his ears. Lord, she envied him.

  Sauron, having overcome Logan’s latest round of defiance, was stomping gaily across the cold, rough-hewn stone floor, singing loudest of all and flapping his wings until the drenched hair of his captives dried and fluttered in the current. His eyes glittered. He wobbled as if sharing in the inebriation with which he had afflicted Wolverine.

  He is still mentally unhinged, thought Psylocke. Insanity still bubbled somewhere beneath the surface. How to uncap it and use it to the X-Men’s advantage? She didn’t know yet, but it was only a matter of time until she uncovered the necessary clue.

  Iceman sped through the trees beside a sluggish, ochre-tinged river. From back in the jungle growth came the crashing of savages atop ostrichlike mounts, a ground pursuit crew to go with the squadron of pterosaurs above. Bobby had kept out of their sight for a mile or more, but they had not lost his trail. If he stopped, they would catch up to him faster than he could make a pile of snowballs.

  The river presented a problem. For the moment, he was hidden from the sky by lush foliage, but he would have to cross soon. Most likely the flyers would spot him in transit. If not, they would see his ice bridge before it melted.

  To make matters worse, he suspected that for the past hour his pursuers had been driving him toward a specific area.

  Bam! Something struck him from the left. He sailed over the low bank into the river.

  Limbs clutched at him, keeping him under. He forced his eyes open. Amid the silt thrashed Amphibius. Every time Bobby started to rise toward the surface, the black-spotted green mutate gripped him and thrust him down again.

  Oh, great. Even in his ice form, he needed air to breathe. Bobby was beginning to grow alarmed when his opponent’s huge foot came crashing through the water into his midsection, driving out much of the dwindling contents of his lungs.

  Now he was more than alarmed. The primal fear of drowning suffused him, spooking him more than several battles with Magneto and the Sentinels had done. He acted instinctively: A pillar of ice formed on the river bottom and sprouted upward. He and Amphibius climbed with it, until they were at the height of a spire twenty feet above the surface of the water.

  Amphibius squawked an
d leapt into the river. He reappeared near the bank, beginning a hop to solid ground.

  He didn’t make it. Bobby froze the river edge. A slab of ice solidified around the mutate’s ankles, immobilizing him.

  “What an amateur,” Bobby called. “A muppet could do better than that.” He had saved that insult for just such an occasion.

  . A clamor blared above his head. He turned to see a pair of riders zooming toward him, the one in the rear sounding the alarm on a ram’s horn bugle. He leapt from the pillar just in time to avoid the flying reptile’s outstretched talons. No counterattack. This was his final chance to buy more time. He formed a ramp, skidded down, and sailed on an ice bridge toward the far bank.

  The second rider screamed past. Iceman ducked, rolled, and flung a handful of icicles upward. Several struck the creature. It screeched from the pain and fought its rider’s command to turn, earning the X-Man another minuscule breather.

  Bobby checked the brightness of the cloud layer, guessing that it was noon. As he was looking upward, a half-dozen more flyers sailed around a bend in the river, flying low. The warriors yelled as they saw him.

  Bobby hurried toward the willows that overhung the far bank. Suddenly his head spun. He tumbled off his ramp into the water. The shock of impact cleared his disorientation. He sat up in knee-deep water and frowned skyward, searching for some explanation.

  And recognized Vertigo atop one of the pteranodons.

  “Uh oh,” he said. Frantically he punched in the code to allow his radio to transmit. “This is it, guys! Going down!”

  A pteranodon streaked past, slashing. Bobby dived to the side. Climbing to his feet, he raised an ice shield and fended off a pair of tossed spears. He had almost regained enough balance and coherency to create a new ramp and scoot the remaining twenty yards to the bank when the willows parted. A dozen wolves gazed out at him, growling and licking their chops.

  There went the fleeting hope of escape. He might be able to fend off their teeth and claws, but their howling and pursuit would prevent him from slipping away.

  Another wave of nausea tumbled him down into the water. He let the current wash him downstream a few yards toward a tirty, reed-strewn islet. What he had thought was a log in the shallows turned out to be a crocodile. It lifted its head, took one step toward him, and he adorned it with a thick muzzle of ice.

  The dizziness struck hard and relentlessly. Bobby flopped on his back, only to see Vertigo and her flying reptile circling closely overhead like a buzzard while other riders set up for attack glides. He tried to ice up her mount’s wings, but he couldn’t aim. Snow flurries erupted, scattering this way and that, dusting the swooping enemies but doing them no damage.

  Talons battered his hands and arms. He was spared being seized. The creatures screeched and jerked back whenever they touched him—apparently they detested the frigidity of his body.

  Iceman groaned and tried to wrap himself in a frozen dome, but he couldn’t concentrate. He barely noticed the warriors dropping into the stream and wading toward him. Two of them seemed unusually large. All seemed to have multiple heads and limbs.

  No, that wasn’t right. His vision was blurred. He forced himself to focus.

  Wait. One of them did have multiple sets of arms.

  Barbaras, with Gaza looming behind him. And Amphibius, freed from the trap, swimming hard toward the scene. With Vertigo above and Lupo no doubt somewhere not far behind his wolves. All the major baddies except Brainchild and Sauron himself. Obviously, this operation had been intended as the final mop-up of X-Men.

  He sure hoped Hank and Sam appreciated this.

  , Barbaras’s four fists pounded him. Gaza lifted him and slammed him back down into the reeds. When Bobby raised a hand to form an ice club, another pulse of dizziness removed any control he had over his muscles.

  Gaza, Barbaras, and Amphibius took turns bashing him until, inevitably, he reverted to standard human form. One big bruise later, he slipped into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER

  Hank McCoy emerged from a cleft between two boulders, shielded his eyes from the sourceless glare rebounding off the layer of mists above, and scanned the wildflower-dotted pastures and rocky outcroppings ahead. A small herd of eohippus darted sideways and whinnied, perhaps scenting his fragrant blue body—he wished he could have approached into the wind. A bull au-roch chewed its cud by a small spring, ignoring the armadillo! ike glyptodont browsing in the reeds at the water’s edge. Nothing out of the ordinary for this fragment of the Savage Land.

  The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became that this was ideal territory for Sauron. No jungle growth to entangle his wings, far less cover to hide infiltrators. A Lear jet-sized quetzalcoatlus rode past on a thermal draft, considered the auroch and the dawn horses, and whipped upward almost to the inversion layer. Within the past hour, since emerging from the swamp, the Beast had also spotted the biggest harpy eagle he had ever seen.

  Cannonball caught up with him. Sam glanced down at his wrist radio. Hank sighed.

  Waiting for the right moment to act was the hardest part of strategy and tactics.

  An hour had passed since they had received Bobby’s blurted transmission. The lack of any followup confirmed that he had been defeated. That was bad enough. What was worse was that they still didn’t know if his sacrifice had gained them any advantage.

  “I could cover a lot more ground if I could coast along on a kinetic envelope,” Cannonball said. His flying ability had already helped considerably in crossing the swamp and the jungle to the base of the foothills, under the cover of the trees.

  “As right as a harvest moon over your farm’s weather-vane, my boy. But you endeavored in precisely that man-fjner the first day we searched, and it achieved no tangible result.”

  “Well, no, but it felt like I was doin’ somethin’.” Sam sat down on a small boulder and rubbed at the grass stains on the blue knees of his costume. “Don’t kid me now, Dr. McCoy—I’m sure this here ‘patience’ an’ tip-toeing around wasn’t easy for you when you was young.”

  “When I was young?” Hank snorted. “Do you take me for some decrepit octogenarian?”

  “Nah. You ain’t a day over sixty, are ya? It’s hard to tell with all that hair. You could be dyein’ the gray to blue.”

  Sam managed a hint of a smile, which Hank returned, but the jokes were wearing thin. What they needed was some luck. That had been in short supply so far on the mission.

  “Look at that,” Sam said. “Somethin’ sure spooked them there li’l horses.”

  The Beast turned. The eohippus herd was clattering away up the slope. Like so many deer—they really looked much like fawns, complete with white spots on their rumps—though they galloped, not bounded the way deer would.

  “They caught wind of some sort of predator,” Hank said.

  He scrutinized the little gully to their left. It contained the muddy prints of and the droppings of mammoth and other animals. The dawn horses were doing their best to avoid that trail, though it would have been the fastest route out of the little dell in which they had been grazing.

  Around the shoulder of a hill came a sabretooth tiger, striding along with great purpose. The cat spared the eohip-pus no more than a dismissive glance.

  “Hey,” said Cannonball. “Ain’t that... ?”

  “Zabu!” Hank called. Not so loudly that his voice echoed over the landscape, but so that it carried to Ka-Zar’s faithful animal.

  Zabu paused and regarded them. He emitted a sound midway between a lion’s rumble and a house cat’s inquisitive meow. He remained there no longer than it took to stare at the rumps of the last few eohippus and lick his lips, then he continued up the animal track.

  “That boy knows where he’s goin’.” Sam nodded his head firmly. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

  “Of course, my boon companion,” the Beast replied. “We’ve been ignoring one of our most talented allies. Who better than Zabu would know where to fin
d Ka-Zar?”

  They pranced down to the trail and jogged behind the tawny feline. The animal acknowledged them with a flick of his ear. He proceeded onward at a pace meant for endurance, pausing regularly as if checking some sort of scent.

  “We’re an inordinately long way from Tongah’s village,” the Beast commented. “This must be one fatigued kitty.”

  “Tired or not, I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side. He looks like he’s mad enough to tackle a T. rex.”

  Fur ruffled on Zabu’s back and he growled softly, as if to say, Bring 'em on.

  “How do you suppose he knows where to go?” Sam added.

  Hank scratched himself behind one of his tufted ears. “You are gazing upon the super hero of all sabretooths, my boy. His talents surpass the rest of his species the way, oh, the Hulk’s strength exceeds that of yours or mine.”

  Zabu turned, snarled, and resumed trotting down the trail,

  “You know,” the junior X-Man quipped, “it makes my belly button quiver when he acts that smart.”

  The terrain grew rougher and more rocky. The trail dipped into a ravine and wound onward parallel to a brush-filled, frolicking brook. The air took on an alpine crispness, though it was that of the Alps in high summer.

  Zabu stopped so abruptly the two X-Men nearly bumped into his haunches.

  “What is it, old fellow?” whispered the Beast.

  The cat grumbled in reply, abandoned the trail, and began climbing the slope, hopping from rock to rock and checking frequently to determine what he could see farther up the ravine.

  Hank bounded after him, leaving Sam playing catch-up, grumbling under his breath about the steepness of the grade and the continued need to avoid flying. Near the top Zabu crept into a fissure and peeked out from the shade of overhanging rock. It was a see-without-being-seen vantage, and Hank made sure to share in the caution. Sam, bless his greenhorn soul, did not require a prompting to act accordingly.