“I’ll be an orangutan’s nephew,” the Beast murmured, eyes widening.
Atop the lead mammoth was Lupo. Apparently his power to control certain animals had allowed him to quell the fear Zabu had instilled in these members of the stampede. He had turned them around. The barrage of tusks and tree-trunk legs sent the battling guards and Ka-Zar and his sabretooth scrambling to get out of the way.
“Hey!” Hank yelled. “That was my trick!”
“Heads up!” Iceman cried. Bobby was suddenly beside Hank. He threw up an ice barrier that shielded the console area, protecting himself, Hank, Shanna, Brainchild, and Vertigo.
The lead mammoth stomped past. Lupo was slapping its ears, trying to get it to obey him completely. So far his efforts appeared futile. The creature rushed on toward the exit.
The other two members of its herd followed close behind. Hank saw for the first time that one of these carried Gaza. Atop the other danced Wolverine. As Gaza swung his club at Logan, Logan swung his claws at the giant. The altercation had not resolved itself before the woolly transports vanished down the tunnel.
“I have a feeling they’re going to be back,” Bobby said. “We'd better wrap this up. Can’t do anything with mammoths tramping through.”
“That, my dear Mr. Drake, was the reason we chased the herd in here in the first place,” Hank said wryly.
Ororo took charge of the defeated captives, dragging them back to the slabs for confinement. Psylocke joined Bobby and Hank as they charged into the disorganized array of guards. Thanks to Zabu and Ka-Zar—and earlier, to Wolverine, Shanna, and the mammoths—several of the enemy tribesmen already littered the cavern’s rough-hewn floor. Psylocke saw to them, plunging her diluted but effective psychic knife into their skulls, ensuring that they would remain unconscious long enough to pose no threat to the outcome of the battle.
Hank pursed his lips, foregoing his usual lighthearted banter. This was the grunt work phase. He tackled a warrior who had just made it back to his feet and held him until Psylocke could minister her touch of grace. Nearby, Bobby tripped others with ice staffs and weighted them down with piles of snow, again until Ms, Braddock could pay a visit.
Killing would be too good for most of them, Hank reflected, knowing how many innocent victims had fallen to these raiders. But some might not be murderers. This way, the bad could later be sorted from the only-slightly-bad. Justice need not be hasty to be well served.
Ka-Zar’s fist connected with a huge, gap-toothed warrior, who collapsed, leaving the immediate area clean of enemies. The Lord of the Savage Land sighed, turned to Hank, and shook his head. “If I hadn’t been drained of strength and tied up for eighteen hours, I would have taken care of him much faster.”
Zabu cornered one last resistor, a middle-aged, scowling woman with breath so disagreeable Hank could smell it from ten feet away. The cat, as ever not one to apply unnecessary violence, backed her against the cavern wall without slashing. She trembled so hard Hank thought her elbows would fall off. Then she looked up and saw Psylocke approaching, and trembled more.
“What goes around, comes around, Pibah,” Betsy said, and thrust her intangible weapon between the tribeswoman’s eyes. The crone gave up one small whimper and folded into a lump.
Hank nodded. He scanned around. In the lower reaches of the cavern, calm prevailed at last. Ororo had finished shackling the defeated mutates. The greatest source of danger remaining in their midst was a pile of mammoth dung a few steps away, a deposit whose slippery nature had already caused the premature defeat of one of the raiders.
Above, it was a different story. Sauron wheeled about, vigorous and agile despite constant rebounding assaults on the part of Cannonball. Sam was blasting at full speed, ric-ochetting off stalactites and walls faster than a pinball. The distracted look in Sauron’s eyes showed the villain was growing more and more dazed, but so far he had avoided a direct hit.
Warren soared in and out of the tangle, waiting for his moment. His lack of strength prevented him from closing in. Sauron’s constant changes of direction and Sam’s frequent interference prevented Archangel from casting his wing knives.
Beside Hank, Iceman grimaced. “He’s moving too fast. Don’t know where to put my ice.”
‘ ‘Raise some walls and divide the cavern into smaller sections,” Hank suggested. “Eventually Sauron won’t have any maneuvering room.”
“Okay,” Bobby said. “Don’t know how fast I can do that, though. I’m still awfully depleted.”
‘ ‘Just—’ ’
The cavern began rumbling again.
“Here come the mammoths!” Hank cried. “Clear a path!”
The group rushed to yank inert bodies out of the center of the chamber. Iceman strained to erect guard rails, providing the stampede with a track. Hank hoped the animals would follow it.
The three behemoths roared from the tunnel as red-eyed as ever. They were moving slightly slower. Tiring at last. Lupo was firmly ensconced on the lead bull, but his yips and
howls and gestures made it clear he still had no real control.
The battle atop the other two animals continued to rage. Claw marks scored Gaza’s arms. Wolverine’s scalp was matted with blood. Just as the combatants whisked past the huddled clump of X-Men, Logan buried his claws like skewers in Gaza’s club and yanked.
Gaza let go too slowly. Unbalanced, he tumbled off the rear end of the mammoth. Wolverine stayed with his beast. He was still working the club off his claws when he disappeared once more down the passageway, a tusk-length behind Lupo.
Gaza sat up. He did not look pleased.
“How generous of our confederate to share his bounty with us,” Hank declared. He charged in. His kick knocked the mutate over before he could fully straighten up.
“Whuff!” the Beast grunted. Gaza’s own kick, from the ground, sent Hank ten feet into the air. The villain had tremendously good aim for someone who had been blind from birth.
Gaza rose to his feet and tried to stomp Hank, but only made it one step. Iceman put a patch of ice in his way, and Ororo buffeted him with a gust. He toppled over. He got only to his hands and knees before Zabu landed squarely on him. The cat remained aboard until Psylocke thrust her ethereal blade into the giant’s skull.
Hank rose, rubbing the huge bruise Gaza had raised on his thigh, but grinning. “I like these odds.”
They had only an instant to savor the victory. “Oh, no!” Ororo cried.
Hank glanced upward. Cannonball was zooming across the jagged ceiling without his kinetic envelope around him, carried by the momentum of his last ricochet. Sauron screeched in glee.
“He nailed Sam with hypnotism!” Bobby cried out. “Made him drop his blast field!”
Before the Iceman’s comments were out of his mouth, Cannonball collided with a stalactite head first. He folded up and fell.
To Hank, the next two seconds happened in telescoped time, so full of incidents that it seemed a much greater span passed. As Cannonball fell, Ororo sent up a wind to catch him. Weakened as she was, all she managed was to cut the speed of his descent. Iceman simultaneously raised his hands to do something, grunted, and began creating a mound of snow on the cavern floor instead.
The Beast jumped directly beneath Sam’s plummeting form. He caught him with both arms, scooping him up as expertly as a major-league outfielder catching a fly ball. The impact knocked both of them into the packed powder.
“Didn’t have enough juice left to make an ice slide,” Iceman reported, and sagged to his knees.
“You did enough,” Hank said. He gestured at Sam, who though unconscious, was breathing evenly. “I told this young man he needed to wear a helmet.”
Sauron’s peacock-shrill shrieks pulled the Beast’s attention upward. The monster swooped in on Archangel, taking advantage of Warren’s spent resources. His long hind feet battered the X-Man in the head. Warren fluttered downward, blinking and clutching at a cut on his temple. He managed a fitful toss of wing blades.
One of the knives sank into Sauron’s thigh. The villain screamed and began to spasm, caught in the throes of the projectile’s short-circuiting effect. For an instant, Hank thought he would fall along with Warren. Clearly, the fight had drained a great deal of the energy he had stolen from his captives. But he stabilized, pulled out the knife, and cast it aside.
“You haven’t won yet!” Sauron cried. The statement was so vehement Hank thought their enemy would race straight toward them. But he soared over to a high ledge and reached into a small niche.
“There’s a door up there,” Psylocke said.
There was. A section of the stone wall moved away. “I’ll be back at a time of my choosing,” Sauron taunted, and slipped into a corridor, shutting the portal.
Ororo tried to rise on her winds, but halfway up she groaned and was forced to retreat to the floor. By then, Archangel was able to stand. He launched upward, made it to the ledge, and yanked at the door.
' •- “He’s barred it somehow. It would take more firepower than we’ve got right now to bash through.”
Hank dribbled a little snow in Cannonball’s face, hoping it would nudge him awake, but the kid didn’t stir. Hank regretted that Cyclops or Rogue had not come along on the mission.
“We’ll get it open,” Bobby said confidently.
“Not soon enough, I fear,” said Hank.
The chamber was astonishingly quiet compared to a few moments earlier. Just low moans from Brainchild, an echo of mammoths stomping around somewhere deep inside the mountain, and a faint squawking filtering down a narrow passageway near the well, where he’d seen some of the raiders flee.
“I know that sound,” Ka-Zar blurted. “We can still stop Sauron!” He whirled toward Betsy. “How much of your power is back?”
She winced. “Some. I was getting through to him just now. I think that’s a big reason he ran away.”
“Enough to do some damage if you get close?”
“Get me within ten meters of him and he’s history,” Betsy said fervently
“Come with me!” The Lord of the Savage Land grasped Psylocke by the wrist and sprinted for the small passageway. “Come on, Zabu!”
Shanna sighed. “That man. Never stops to explain. Always trying to do things himself.” She took off in his wake, waving Storm and Archangel after her. “We can use anyone who can fly.”
The sabretooth took the lead and plunged into the opening. The five heroes followed at their best speed.
Hank and Bobby looked at each other. At their feet, Sam groaned and began rubbing his head like a toddler trying to remember how to wake up from a nap.
“I suppose we’re elected to keep things under control here,” Hank groused. He gazed at Gaza’s prone form. “We’d better drag him to a slab before he gives us any more bruises.”
“Hope whatever Ka-Zar’s got in mind works,” Bobby muttered, grabbing one of Gaza’s wrists. He slicked up the floor with ice and began dragging the mutate along the slippery surface.
“Nah,” Hank joked. “He just wanted an excuse to run off with Betsy.”
Iceman let go of Gaza to rest. “You know, I’m pooped. While the others take care of Sauron, I sure hope Lupo and Amphibius don’t give us grief.”
“They won’t.” The speaker was Wolverine, who appeared from the shadows of the cave, sans mammoths, dragging two inert bodies behind him. The captive on his left side had green, slimy skin; the one on the right had dark fur and pointed ears. Hank was surprised to see them both still breathing. He concluded they must have surrendered before Logan got in a really bad mood.
“To the slabs with them all,” Hank chirped. He regarded Brainchild’s smashed console. Not permanently damaged, from what he could determine at a glance. He picked up a pair of discarded inhibitor collars from the floor. “Let’s see if I can get this equipment working again. This crew is overdue for a dose of their own prescription.”
As they plunged down the long, twisting passageway, Psylocke considered reading Ka-Zar’s mind to learn what his plan was, but she needed to save up her psychic strength in order to defeat Sauron. She trusted that soon enough, she would know anyway.
And she did. They rounded one last curve and found themselves in the midst of a pterosaur aerie. The chamber was huge, larger even than the one that had housed the prisoners. Pteranodons and a handful of pterodactyls hopped and fluttered about on log perches, disturbing great piles of their own droppings. They were blindfolded—probably the only way they could be controlled in such a confined space.
On the far side air flowed in through a gap just wide enough for the largest of the creatures to fly through. The opening was angled downward—it would not have been visible when the X-Men had conducted their aerial surveillance over the previous two days.
Ororo and Warren ran immediately to the slot and jumped. Psylocke’s heart stopped beating until she saw Ororo loft upward, feebly but sufficiently supported by her winds.
The only human there in the roost to greet them was a wiry, gray-haired old savage, a long-time pterosaur trainer judging by the talon scars on his arms and legs. He backed up against the wall and put up empty hands when Zabu trotted up to him.
Betsy quickly scanned his mind. Not an active raider, just a devoted keeper of the flying reptiles who had refused to leave his station when his compatriots had fled. “It’s all right, Zabu,” she called. “He’s not a problem.”
Zabu flicked his ear at her and coughed a feline acknowledgment. Suddenly she was brushed by a sentient whisper she recalled sensing during her imprisonment. She smiled. Just as she had suspected, it was Zabu’s mind she had touched back then. So that’s how Hank and Sam had found the cavern. What a cat.
“Four or five raiders got away through here during the battle,” she related to Ka-Zar. “And Sauron came through just moments ago.” She pointed to a narrow opening halfway up one wall, the end point of the escape route the mutate leader had taken.
He nodded. “What’s important is that they left some of the squadron behind.” He reached up and pulled the blindfold from the sturdy pteranodon he had been soothing. He led it toward the exit. “Ready to fly?”
Betsy glanced at Shanna, who was struggling to calm down another of the flying reptiles.
“She’ll come along when she gets that turkey under control. We can’t wait for her,” Ka-Zar said.
Betsy braced herself, hopped to the front of the saddle, and made room for Ka-Zar. With a sickening lurch, the creature leapt and spread its wings.
A gorge opened up beneath them. They soared so low she could make out individual dragonflies amid the cattails and reeds of the stream below. And those were standard dragonflies, not the monstrosities that lived in the jungle.
“Is this thing strong enough to carry two of us?” she yelled.
“I think so,” Ka-Zar shouted into the wind. “We’ll find out.”
The pteranodon flapped its wings, gained altitude, and found a thermal updraft. Immediately it vaulted toward the roof of clouds high above. The Savage Land appeared in all its glory. Psylocke spotted Storm not far ahead, still within-the pleistocene zone. Ororo was wobbling and was keeping low, where she wouldn’t have as far to fall if her powers gave out.
Archangel was farther ahead, but not by much. He had barely reached the fringes of the jungle. He was pumping his wings as hard as he could manage, clearly a man with a goal. Betsy looked ahead and saw why. A green, batlike speck out over the swamp could only be Sauron.
Ka-Zar saw it, too, and spurred their mount. The wind blasted the sweat of battle right off Betsy’s exposed skin. The pteranodon screeched, obviously angry to be pushed so hard. Luckily, that anger fueled it to even greater momentum. They raced right past Ororo and Warren.
Surely they couldn’t catch Sauron. He had a good lead, and no one to carry. But he was merely gliding now, turning in a weary arc out over the great central lake, scattering a flock of cranes.
Ka-Zar changed direction, closing the gap as Sauro
n continued to follow a curve rather than get as far away as fast as he could.
A chill ran down Psylocke’s spine. “He’s baiting us. He wants to fight.” She was as certain as if she had read Sauron’s thoughts.
“If that’s so, he’s doing us a favor,” Ka-Zar declared.
Great minds think alike, Betsy thought. Ka-Zar’s breath was strong against the nape of her neck. She could read his passion and commitment. Victory or death. The clarity of the emotion was like a drug, coursing from his veins to hers and back again.
As they reached the shore of the lake, placing them past the last convenient source of cover, Sauron turned directly at them and began flapping hard. Ka-Zar eased off on the reins of the pteranodon. Psylocke knew he was saving energy and calculating the best evasive maneuver, but she ceased paying attention. She was gathering all her psychic resources into a pinpoint—as focused a measure as calling up her knife.
Her reservoir of power opened, supplying her with only a fraction of her usual allotment. She gritted her teeth. What you have, you use. No seme worrying about what isn 't available.
Suddenly Ka-Zar groaned. Betsy hissed in pain. A strident hypnotic command pierced them from one side of their brains to the other: Stay there. Don’t move.
For the span of two heartbeats, Ka-Zar’s hands were immobile on the reins. Their mount soared on in a straight line. Sauron bore down. The villain may have been too rattled back in the cavern to cope with Cannonball’s fusillade, but he was in the clear now, able to concentrate.
But Sauron, for all his psychic talent, was not a full telepath. She was. She quashed the mesmerizing voice, first in her mind, then in Ka-Zar’s.
“Duck!” she blurted.
Ka-Zar jabbed his knees into the pteranodon’s sides. The creature tucked its wings. They slid under Sauron’s outstretched talons so narrowly Betsy lost several strands of hair.
Sauron screeched and circled back toward them. “So precipitously you pursue me! I am not spent yet! And you are oh, so sluggish aboard that poor, overburdened beast!”
Psylocke put more juice into the mental force field she had erected around herself and Ka-Zar. Sauron had found a way to accentuate his attack—by using spoken words rather than silently projecting his wishes.
Law of the Jungle Page 20
