X-Men(tm) The Last Stand

by Chris Claremont

  Once the bridge had settled into place, with the tower a ways offshore and what remained of the roadway extending far enough to flatten a line of waterfront structures, people regained enough confidence to gather and watch what happened next as the other tower was brought into line with Alcatraz, and then deposited.

  The bottom depths there weren’t anywhere near consistent with those at the mouth of the bay itself, so the bridge ended up canted at a dramatic and awkward angle, tilting downward from city to island, with one end of the roadway suspended at a decent height above the shoreline while the other wasn’t all that much higher than the water itself.

  Magneto hadn’t really cared much about the people underneath the bridge as he maneuvered it into place. He had no actual intent of killing anyone. He just didn’t have the energy to spare and besides, they were only sapiens. They were functionally irrelevant to the future he was trying to bring about, and the sooner they were shuffled off the evolutionary stage the more merciful it would be for them. As for the troops assigned to the island—this was the risk, and price, that came with the uniform.

  The journey concluded a bit more abruptly than Magneto would have preferred. He was a man of sublime precision, as much as Xavier, and it irked him to miscalculate the final descent so that the bridge crashed to rest with a jolt severe enough to knock everyone standing off their feet. Only he and Jean remained upright.

  He shook off the hand she’d used to steady him and, as though to prove his might to all present, immediately levitated above the crowd, giving them all a grandstand view as he hovered to the forefront of the bridge and used his powers to partially collapse that end of the roadway, combining it with a gathering of debris from the crushed barracks to form an easily negotiable ramp from bridge to island. Beyond, at the highest point, rose the cellblocks.

  In the White House Situation Room, Bolivar Trask was the first to take notice of what was happening. Only minutes had passed from Magneto’s initial incursion onto the bridge, and the news was still making its way up the government information tree. What caught Trask’s eye was a hard to watch visual on one of the TV monitors tuned to Fox News, what caught his ear was an anchor reduced to stammering incredulity.

  He wondered as he spoke if his own voice sounded the same.

  “Mr. President,” he said quietly, in that unimaginably matter-of-fact voice that one calls upon to announce the imminent end of the world, “I think you should see this.”

  Even as David Cockrum turned to look at the screen, some techs in their cubbyholes had worked magic of their own, projecting network news feeds on subordinate screens while saving the main display for a Keyhole KH-13 surveillance satellite-view of the scene from orbit, enhancing the image to take into account the fact that it was almost nighttime.

  There was a gap across Golden Gate Strait, as glaring as the suddenly toothless space in a hockey player’s mouth after a close encounter with a puck. And there was a landlink connecting the island of Alcatraz with the city on its doorstep.

  “My God,” the president said in a whisper.

  And then, because that was his job, he called his military advisors to order and started planning how to deal with it.

  Allan Ryerson could barely believe he was still alive. In all the confusion, as the bridge swung across the bay and then crashed spectacularly to rest, the surrounding cars had shifted away enough for him to force open his door. But now that they could escape, he wasn’t sure it was such a great idea.

  A couple of car-lengths ahead of him, Magneto descended once more to the roadway. Now that the sun had set, and with the power to the roadway lights severed when the bridge was torn from its moorings, it was dangerously difficult to see. The only illumination came from the city behind them, the ambient radiance cast by its apartments and skyscrapers, which barely lit up the opposite end of the bridge. The way ahead, to Alcatraz, was shrouded in total darkness.

  Magneto didn’t seem bothered by this in the slightest. He glowed, just a little, outlined in a pale blue corona like a minor display of Saint Elmo’s fire. Allan yelped as his SUV’s lights came on, along with those of every other car that remained on the bridge. The vehicles had been arranged with purpose, so that their headlights created a more than sufficient pool of illumination that stretched the length of the bridge and extended out onto the island.

  Allan couldn’t help staring, awestruck and impressed. Acknowledging his reaction, Magneto inclined his head and allowed Allan one of those practiced, professional smiles favored by British royalty.

  Blair was far more practical. She slapped the door lock closed and protectively gathered her children about her.

  That actually made Magneto chuckle—although there was a haunted aspect to the shadowed eyes beneath the brow of his helmet that Allan would never forget, and which belied the outward and very real humor of the moment.

  Magneto’s memory was not as pristine and absolute as a telepath’s, but there were certain instances that could not be excised. Looking at Blair Ryerson reminded him of one, from an age he wished he could forget, when he was huddled in the arms of a woman who wasn’t his mother, yet who was determined to protect him just the same, crammed into the corner of a cattle car trundling through the bleak wilderness of a Polish winter, from one camp of misery to another.

  Auschwitz wasn’t up and running as a death camp in those days. They were among the first inmates, the ones who had to help construct the facilities, and that spared them the fate of those who followed, those sent to the gas chambers. They were simply worked to death, under that damnable legend Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Makes Freedom.

  “Never again,” Magneto breathed to himself, turning violently from the past—his own and humanity’s—and waving his makeshift army of revolution towards what he was determined to make a bright and shining future.

  Jean watched Erik take the lead, more aware of his thoughts and what they meant than he was, and she took a moment to sweep her gaze across the family in their Mercedes GL500. They were confused, they were afraid, they were angry at the wanton assault—and yet, there was no hate.

  What to make of that, she wondered, and suggested with another thought that this was no fit place for them. And just to make it easier, she used a little twist of telekinesis to make sure all their car doors opened freely.

  The moment Jean passed, Allan Ryerson burst from the driver’s seat, wrenching open the sliding door beside his daughter and gathering Gee Gee into his arms while Blair and Tim tumbled free, Tim still clutching his handful of comics like they were a talisman, and Blair holding on to him just as tightly, for the same reason. Gee Gee started howling. They’d left her stuffed bear, and Allan handed her off to Blair, made a frantic dash back to the car, cursing a blue streak as he tore through the clutter until he found the animal. Then he gathered his family and they fled for their lives.

  Jean watched them go. Only when she was positive they were safely on shore did she turn to follow Magneto.

  On the island, frantic radio calls for help went unanswered, as all the emergency frequencies were occluded by sleet storms of impenetrable static. The same applied to video and cellular links, and internal communications were also crashed, as was every computer on the island, from network superservers to handheld PDAs. The lights were still on, but that was more for the convenience of the invading force than any defenders.

  In his office, which used to be the warden’s, with a view that overlooked the entire prison, Warren Worthington Jr. and Kavita Rao stood at the window and stared straight down the roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge and into the faces of the mutants who’d come to destroy their life’s work.

  Deep within the main cell house, on the opposite side of the island, in his room which afforded him his favorite view of the great bridge, young Jimmy—code-named Leech—took one last look at the yawning empty space where it used to be before burying himself in a cocoon of quilts and covers and stuffed animals of his own beneath the bed.

  Back on the b
ridge, Magneto led the way, Callisto by his side, flanked in a shallow arrowhead formation by Pyro and Juggernaut on one side, Arclight and Kid Omega on the other.

  Jean, as always, was a little bit behind.

  Callisto advanced a few steps, taking point, casting her perceptive net across the whole of the island.

  “Boy’s in the back,” she announced with satisfaction. “Southwest corner of the big building.” She pointed to the squat, massive structure of the cell house.

  “Well then,” Magneto informed them, “this place has long since outlived its purpose. Let’s take it down to the nails.”

  He reversed position and raised his hands.

  At that signal, the mass of mutants who’d been following surged forward with a great, accompanying cry, a dozen fliers assuming the vanguard, scattering in combat pairs across the rock while twenty more streaked after them across the ground.

  Juggernaut began to follow, but Magneto motioned him back.

  “In chess,” he said meditatively, “the pawns go first.”

  Jean shook her head. Scott wouldn’t have been so dismissive; for him, for Charles, even pawns had value. But they were dead. It was left to Magneto to seize the day, and lay claim to the future.

  In a sequence of bounds, a young woman whose mutation made her mostly lizard, with the predatory speed and power of a Komodo dragon, raced through the ruined barracks, up a wall, leapt to a rooftop and from there to the lighthouse—where she took a perch at the top, using eyes that saw as well by night as by day, and a forked tongue even better at finding prey, to scout the way ahead. The eyes saw nothing untoward.

  The danger tasted by her tongue came too late.

  Even as Komodo raised the alarm, troopers arose from hidden ambush points, and grenadiers on all sides unleashed a volley from shoulder-mounted missile launchers. Football-shaped projectiles, smaller than regulation balls, more akin to the ones given to grade-schoolers, arced through the air, detonating over the roadbed of the bridge where it met the island, filling the air with a cloud of minute flechettes the size of toothpicks.

  At first it seemed like a joke, like being attacked by gnats. The darts were so fine they could slip through the weave of an ordinary cotton shirt, though the heavier thickness and construction of a jacket or military-issued cloth could quite easily deflect them. Even when they struck home, they barely stung. Some of the mutants didn’t even realize they’d been hit. But the mutants in the first wave were the target of a score of projectiles from which came uncountable numbers of darts, enough to carpet the roadbed in a veritable lawn of plastic, many exploding upwards as well, to strike any of the fliers overhead.

  Everyone froze for a moment, expecting—assuming—the worst.

  Komodo plucked one dart from her neck.

  “It’s a dud,” she crowed, convulsively sweeping all the others she could reach from her skin, furious with herself for being so spooked when the bombs had been launched. She had been sure they were goners.

  “Keep up the attack!” she yelled, and bared her teeth ferociously, deciding it was time to run down some soldiers and scare them just the same as she’d been.

  But then—with staggering suddenness—her snarl twisted into a rictus of pain. Komodo wanted to cry out in denial, she wanted to beg for mercy, because she remembered what she’d seen on TV, how it had been with the mutant in Brooklyn, and knew it was the same now with her. A cascade of pain stole away both breath and thought and she collapsed to hands and knees on the observation platform, watching in anguish as her skin rippled like a pond of water with fish fighting over bait right beneath the surface. Her hands lost their webbing, her skin its bright pattern. She screamed, wanting to hurl herself to the rocks below, better to end everything than endure such misery—not simply the agony of transformation, for she knew much worse was to come as her bones reshaped themselves back to their original baseline sapien configuration, but the awful fate of living with the memory of what she’d been, the certain knowledge that those days were gone forever.

  She reached for the lowest bar of the railing, pushed with her feet against the wall behind her, but she didn’t move. She had no strength. In every respect, save perhaps for weeping, she was done.

  Overhead, some of the fliers who hadn’t been hit made frantic, diving grasps for their fellows who had, reflexively trying to save their falling friends. Some they caught, some they missed, some yanked free of the hands that held them, and the night was broken by the sound of dull, scattered impacts, like sacks of meat striking the earth.

  Thirty-five mutants had been hit.

  Thirty-five men and women—although some might better be called boys and girls, they were so young—in varying stages of devolution, took their place.

  “That,” remarked Magneto from his summit on the bridge, “is why the pawns go first.” He shook his head. “Humans and their guns.”

  Ahead and below, mop-up teams emerged into view—a full company of regular army, evenly split between those equipped with the dart weapons and those with riot gear, plus a contingent of medics to deal with any wounded. A Humvee rolled into the courtyard, sporting a water cannon to help the riot troops deal with the prisoners while the combat platoon took up new positions to prepare for the expected second wave.

  A lieutenant spoke into his radio, tried again, then tossed the set aside in disgust; electronics were useless. Using hand signals, he passed word to his platoon sergeants and squad leaders to begin their advance. These were tough, experienced professionals, veterans one and all, who’d learned their trade in urban warfare.

  Magneto faced Jean.

  “Destroy them,” he told her.

  She ignored him, concentrating her attention—at least in part—on the view ahead, as the last airborne mutants were picked off by snipers.

  “Jean,” Magneto snapped commandingly, in a tone of exceptional harshness, “do as I say!”

  She let him see a hint of the fire in her eyes, in her soul.

  “You sound like him again.”

  He met her gaze without fear.

  From the island, the lieutenant’s voice rang out: “Fire!”

  A volley of missiles arced towards the bridge.

  Magneto snatched up a pair of cars and brought them together well ahead of him to form a barrier, instantly flattening and expanding the metal fabric of the vehicles to form a bowl-shaped shield that enveloped the bombs the instant they detonated, to ensure not a single dart escaped.

  Just as quickly, he rounded on Arclight, a tall and rawboned woman who looked as though she’d just stepped out of an ancient Hellenic portrait of some Amazon warrior battling before the walls of Troy.

  “Can you control your shock waves,” he demanded, “to target those weapons and destroy them all at once?”

  She looked dismissively towards the advancing troops.

  “You find the right wavelength,” she replied, “everything breaks.”

  “Amen to that,” agreed Juggernaut.

  Arclight popped another stick of Beeman’s gum into her mouth to complement the one she was already chewing, then moved a few steps clear of the others to stand alone in the center of the roadway, seemingly intent on making herself the ideal, irresistible target. This was why Magneto had let her experiment with one of the weapons they’d claimed from the transport guards—to find the precise frequency to destroy them.

  As soldiers moved warily into view—understanding full well that while Magneto couldn’t affect their weapons, there was nothing to stop him from using the very bridge against them—Arclight clapped her hands together. The air before her shook with the generation of a localized sonic boom, and visible ripples marked the progress of its energy-charged shock waves as they rolled outward towards the oncoming troops, who responded by bringing their guns up to fire.

  Before a single dart could be unleashed, the shock wave was on them, shattering each and every plastic pistol and rifle they held. Stunned, the soldiers watched the darts they held clatter usele
ssly to the ground.

  The shock waves continued their advance across the entire island, doing the same to every plastic weapon on the Rock.

  As the soldiers on the bridge hastily withdrew to join their fellows on the island, Arclight turned to Juggernaut, hand upheld, and he slapped it in a high five.

  “What about jets?” demanded President Cockrum of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Tanks? There’s an aircraft carrier just offshore. Can’t the Teddy Roosevelt launch an air strike?”

  Bolivar Trask shook his head. “Magneto’ll turn them into scrap metal.”

  Cockrum pounded his fist on the table in frustration. “Where the hell are our ground troops? We have to be able to do something!”

  With the paramount threat neutralized, Magneto led his troops ashore. Jean remained at her perch on the bridge, head cocked to one side as though listening to a conversation only she could hear.

  The X-Men weren’t attempting to mask their thoughts, although they had tech aboard the Blackbird that would allow them to try. Ororo was testing her, Jean knew: would she reveal the X-Men’s approach to Magneto? Ororo wanted to determine now, before the situation escalated, where Jean’s loyalties lay.

  Truth be told, Jean still wasn’t sure.

  Magneto looked, searching for the source of a sound that shouldn’t be there—the muted roar of a pair of jet engines. Jean allowed herself a rueful smile. Apparently, the sound baffles weren’t quite properly tuned.

  “We have visitors,” he warned.

  Ororo announced her arrival with lightning, a bolt powerful enough to illuminate the island bright as day, dazzling those who saw it almost to the point of blindness and opening a crater in the ground.