First Team

by Robbie MacNiven

  “Fine,” Vic conceded. “Six hours, then it’ll be midafternoon. I’m going then, whether you’re ready or not.”

  He looked down at his right arm. The fist ached like crazy, and discolored blotches had appeared across his knuckles. Had he broken them punching his way out of the theater? Would they heal if they were damaged this early on? If the arm was cut off a second time would it still grow back?

  He picked up a half-empty pizza box, trying not to think about any of it. His dad was out there with Rocky, both of them tied up and at the mercy of a cabal of madmen. Only the knowledge that they were about to attempt to free them gave him any kind of solace. Without Ci and Gray, he knew he’d already be back out there.

  No, he corrected himself. Without Ci and Gray he knew he’d already be dead.

  He settled back on his mattress, slowly chewing on the pizza slice while he clenched and unclenched his right fist, waiting for the dawn.

  There was going to be a reckoning.

  •••

  None of them slept much. Vic dozed for a while, and when he came to, he looked up to see Cipher sitting cross-legged on her mattress, unbinding the bloodstained dressing from her arm.

  “What are you doing?” he asked her as she exposed the raw wound.

  “This won’t phase with me,” she said. “I’ll have to go without it.”

  “It’ll reopen.”

  “I’ll deal with that when it happens.”

  Vic stretched and rolled off the bed. His eyes still ached, and his throat felt raw. He picked a water bottle from the crate Cipher had bought when they’d first moved in and carefully opened the door. The strip of concrete between the row of shipping containers and the East River was deserted. Sunlight broke through the low somber gray clouds to pick out Governors Island across the bay from the docks. Vic upended the water bottle over his head, scrubbing at his eyes, then drank the remainder. It made him feel fractionally more alive. Shaking water from his carapace, he stepped back inside and refastened the door.

  Gray now sat at the laptop. It didn’t seem as though he’d slept at all. The harsh glare of the screen gave his sharp features a skull-like appearance. Vic peered over his shoulder and found him scanning a map of Clinton Hill.

  “Do we have a plan?” he asked him.

  “Not especially,” Gray responded unhappily. “It is certain that Lobe will have the streets surrounding the church under surveillance. The question is how far does that surveillance extend? We cannot walk from here to the location without attracting considerable attention, but it is certain Lobe will be aware of the identity of our stolen vehicle.”

  Vic leant further over Gray’s shoulder, assessing the map.

  “Here,” he suggested, pointing past him. “Jaffers Street. That’s about halfway between us and the church. This lane here, then this one, will almost take us to the back of the block overlooking its front doors.”

  “That might work,” Gray conceded.

  “I’ll head out first,” Cipher said, standing up. “And scour the route. Stay on your communicators.”

  She made for the door, but on an impulse Vic took her wrist and pulled her back. “Thank you for being here Ci,” he told her, his earlier frustrations evaporating as the moment of action loomed. “Thank you for... just for being on my team.”

  “It’s my first team,” she said simply and then, without warning, embraced Victor. He was so startled he didn’t immediately react. Gray watched them for a second then, tentatively, moved in to hug them both as well.

  “We’re in this as one,” Cipher told them both. “To the very end, whatever that may be.”

  They broke it up. Gray, so rarely prone to physical displays of affection, carefully patted Vic’s back after drawing away from him.

  “I wished to say thank you too,” he said, almost apologetically, as though offering an explanation.

  “What for?” Vic asked. “You’re only out here risking everything because of me. I’m meant to be thanking you.”

  “There is more to say thank you for than the last few weeks,” Gray said earnestly. “You’ve been a source of strength since the day I woke, Victor. Thank you for being there every night when the nightmares came. For being there to talk when I was afraid to talk to anyone else.”

  “Any time,” Vic said, tapping Graymalkin’s chest for emphasis and smiling at Ci before she departed. “It’s what families are for.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Church of the Seven Virtues had fallen far from the grace intended for it when it had first been built almost two centuries before. The misdeeds of its benefactors and the slow but seemingly inevitable shrinking of its congregation had left it bereft. Eventually the spirit of the building had passed away, alone and uncared for – now its body remained where it had fallen, brittle sandstone walls and the dead eyes of boarded-up windows and doorways, overshadowed by a steeple that was due for demolition following local concerns about an imminent collapse.

  There were, of course, online petitions to save it and occasional requests filed at City Hall calling for it to be listed as a site of historical significance. In the current climate, though, nobody had the money or the genuine desire to throw their weight behind a renovation project, and so the church lay steadily rotting in the midst of an equally dilapidated and forgotten corner of the city.

  The decay appeared to be accelerating too. At some point, seemingly quite recently, part of the west transept wall had collapsed on itself, exposing a direct route into the nave and onto the balcony cloisters, albeit a direct route that was strewn with rubble and weeds.

  “It’s too obvious,” Ci’s voice clicked over the communicator.

  “Are there Purifiers watching it?” Vic responded. He crouched on the ledge of an apartment rooftop he’d scaled almost opposite the church, his skin tone shifted. Graymalkin was in the darkness of the alley below. They’d been observing the broken old church for about fifteen minutes, but Ci had been inside for almost an hour.

  “It doesn’t seem like there are any in the immediate area. They’re mostly at the far end of the nave, where the pyres are. But I’m not omnipotent. Xodus is at the altar, but I can’t find any sign of Lobe.”

  “Maybe he’s not here,” Graymalkin hypothesized over the link. “He does not seem like an individual who would desire to become embroiled in physical exertions.”

  “What about Rocky and Dad?” Vic asked Ci.

  “Still tied to the stakes. Your dad is awake but he’s been gagged. Santo looks unconscious. I think they’re drip-feeding him something to help keep him docile, it’s fixed up to the pole he’s tied to.”

  “Don’t suppose you can free them without anyone noticing?”

  “No,” Ci said bluntly. “There’s well over two dozen of Xodus’s stooges all around the stakes. They’ve started to chant too.”

  “We need to get in there,” Vic said. “We’ve delayed long enough as it is. I’m coming down.”

  “Like I said, if that gap in the wall is unguarded that’s exactly where they want us,” Cipher repeated.

  “Relax, they can’t even see me,” Vic said before pocketing the communicator. As he did so his hand brushed against a small, rubbery shape. He’d brought the toy dinosaur, recovered along with the rest of his rucksack by Gray from the rooftop where he’d left it. He didn’t really know why he’d decided to take it with him today, other than the fact that he thought it might bring him luck. He’d take anything he could get just now.

  He headed for the wall and began to descend carefully. His arm appeared to have recovered from the brutalities of the night before. In fact, it felt stronger than ever, and he seemed to have gotten a good deal of his balance back. He no longer felt as though he was a misplaced fingertip away from losing his purchase whenever he tried to climb something. The arm twinged, but it was a sure sight preferable to not having one.


  He reached the ground, ghosting along the sidewalk to the ruined flank of the church. The area in the vicinity of the former place of worship seemed just as run down as the building itself. Old discolored trash littered the gutters, crude graffiti was scrawled across every surface, and there seemed to be more broken or boarded-up windows than whole ones facing onto the streets. Vic doubted there would have been much foot traffic in an area like this on a busy day, but now that the Purifiers had moved in, people knew to stay away. He’d already spotted their symbol daubed on doors and walls, and passed a trio of their rickety transports parked up in nearby side streets.

  Vic passed into the shadow of the Church of the Seven Virtues, the sudden cold making him shiver. He could hear the chanting from within now, echoing sonorously. It made his skin crawl. There was nothing holy about the Purifier cult, nothing actually pure. He had no doubt that they were the embodiment of the evil they claimed to be rooting out. He had to get Rocky and his dad free from their clutches or die trying.

  The opening in the wall was ahead of him now, a slope of rubble leading to a ragged gap in the stonework. Beyond it was darkness, and the unsettling chanting. Vic climbed the slope, forcing himself to go slow and careful, his senses on edge. As much as he’d refused to admit it to Cipher, she was absolutely correct – there was no way this wasn’t some sort of trap. And Vic was determined to spring it.

  He reached the gap in the wall without incident and slunk inside, on all fours now, skin rippling slightly to match the change in lighting around him. He was in an aisle that seemed to run around the length of the nave, between the exterior wall and the great pillars that supported the vaults. The nave itself stretched out ahead and on either side, littered with rubble, expanding where it met the crossing of the east and west transepts. That space, right before the apse and altar, had once sat beneath a great, soaring dome, but much of the roof there appeared to have caved in at some point. Sunlight beamed down through the hole, leaving the rest of the church in smoky, gentle darkness as it beamed down upon the church’s new, blasphemous congregation.

  Cipher had been right. There were Purifiers everywhere. Vic counted over two dozen, most clustered around two large bundles of timber and kindling. The stakes had been erected there, one timber and one metal. Vic’s heart quickened as he saw his dad and Rocky, the latter missing an arm. His stomach knotted up with tension, his whole body flushed with the need to act. He couldn’t stand to see his dad and his best friend bound and helpless in the midst of these zealots.

  Xodus was present too. The prophet stood beyond the pyres in front of the altar, his back to it. He was flanked on either side by six figures in white robes and black masks. Choristers, Cipher had called them, though just how she knew the specifics of Purifier ranks, he had no idea. Ci tended to know a lot of things. None of them appeared to be joining in the slow, swaying chant that was swelling from the cultists around the pyres. They were just watching. As he assessed their position, Vic noticed a mound of sacks near their feet, midway between the pyres and the apse. He had no idea what they contained. Explosive charges? A final doomsday device should the Purifiers lose the upper hand?

  He crouched beside one of the great support pillars and keyed his communicator, trusting in the echoing reverberations of the dark plainsong to mask his speech.

  “Ci, where you at?” he hissed.

  “West cloister balcony,” she replied softly. “You?”

  “Just came in through the gap,” he said, glancing briefly up at the second level of the church that ran around the upper walls on either side. Unsurprisingly, he caught no sign of Ci.

  “I am outside,” Gray’s voice added. “The light levels are not yet conducive to my work.”

  “It’s darker inside the church,” Vic said, attempting to reassure him.

  “Regardless, it would be optimal if we could wait until evening before making our play.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to be possible, Gray,” Vic murmured. A new procession of Purifiers emerged from the transepts, marching with echoing footsteps towards the pyres from left and right. The lead cultist in each group was carrying a lit torch.

  “We’ve got to hit them, now,” Vic said, tensing up, looking for the shortest open route to the transept crossing.

  “A second longer,” Cipher urged. “I’m coming down.”

  “I’m at the demolished section of the wall,” Gray said. “Like we planned it?”

  “Yes,” Vic said, then checked himself. “No, wait.”

  The torch-bearing Purifiers had halted and turned towards the altar. It wasn’t their pause that had caught Vic though. It was the figure who had just emerged from the stairs to the bell tower, on the eastern transept.

  Lobe. The man was attired as Vic had last seen him in his office in Manhattan, suited and booted. His stride was almost leisurely, as though he had wandered into the old church as part of a tourist trail featuring New York’s least-known run-down historic buildings. He walked unhurriedly through the midst of the Purifiers assembled around the pyres, looking entirely out of place. As he came to stand between the two stakes, facing out towards the rest of the church, Xodus – still behind him at the altar – raised both arms sharply. The chanting came to an abrupt stop, and all those within the church were treated to the unsettling echoes of the throaty words fading slowly away into the dark, crooked corners of the fallen place of worship.

  “Quite something,” Lobe said, calling out as though to an invisible congregation seated in the pews that would once have occupied the long nave before him. “I really must commend Xodus for unearthing this gem. It adds a real touch of the theatrical to proceedings. Don’t you agree, Victor?”

  Vic stayed frozen, convinced Lobe was about to look directly at him. He didn’t though, instead casting his gaze up at the cloisters, the motion somewhat exaggerated, like a showman before a conjuring trick.

  “What’s this I hear?” he carried on. “Nothing? Silence? Don’t tell me the brave students of the Xavier Institute didn’t have the courage to show up after all? I can only apologize, Mr Borkowski.”

  He turned towards Victor’s father, bound and gagged on the smaller of the two pyres, and offered a mocking bow.

  “It seems your son values his own life over yours. He’s not willing to risk his neck fetching his old man out of the fire. Pity. Still, at least it should please our masked guests. I promised them quite the blaze today!”

  Vic’s every instinct screamed at him to tear into his smug tormentor. He checked himself at the last instant. He can’t see you, he told himself. You’ve got to keep calm. Stick to the plan.

  “Maybe you expected that?” Lobe went on, looking from Dan over to Santo. “He’s probably a regular disappointment, isn’t he? It must cut deep though, knowing in your heart that your son, your friend, is such a coward. Not worthy of being an X-Man, certainly. Not worthy of any mutant powers at all. Such a shame. Such wasted potential. Still, no matter. We are making progress every day. Soon the work will be complete. Unfortunately, neither of you will live to see it.”

  Lobe raised a hand and clicked his fingers. Xodus nodded down at the torch-bearing Purifiers, who turned towards the pyres.

  “Vic, wait,” Cipher said over the communicator, but Vic wasn’t listening, not any more. He charged, out from behind the pillar, skin rippling as he vaulted the rubble littering the nave and went straight for Lobe and the pyre stacks framing him.

  They saw him coming. Lobe smiled broadly and spread his arms wide, welcoming him even as Purifiers closed in from left and right, barring Vic’s route. They were armed, too. The echoing space filled with the vibration of charged energy weapons.

  Vic turned his headlong rush into a diving roll. He thumped into a block of fallen sandstone masonry just as the air around him went electric. The stone at his back shook, and dust filled the air, lit by actinic bolts as stray shots whipped o
verhead. He snatched up his communicator.

  “Ci, you going?” he asked breathlessly.

  He got no direct response, but the shout of dismay ringing over the crack of gunfire was enough. He risked a glance around the side of his cover, just in time to see one of the torches being torn from the fingers of an advancing Purifier by an invisible entity. While Vic had been rushing forward, Cipher had gotten down amongst them without being detected. The first torch went arcing into the east transept, its flame doused as it clattered over the flagstones. The second soon followed, the Purifiers casting about in dismay. A great wail rose up from them, and Vic wondered if they believed some devious, invisible spirit had come to confound their dark worship.

  The fire being directed at where he sheltered slackened off almost as quickly as it had started, and it wasn’t because of the sudden attack on the torchbearers. There was a blur of activity, in amongst the shadows beyond the pillars off to the right. Graymalkin was in the building.

  Sensing the imminent attack, the nearest Purifiers turned their weaponry on the encroaching darkness, but Gray drew enough strength from the half-shadows to tear behind the final pillar on the east side of the nave. More energy blasts lacerated the stone, filling the air with fresh bursts of dust.

  Vic shifted and moved. The ripple of motion directed more bolts back his way, but too slow. He managed to get down behind a second fallen wedge of masonry, his heart hammering, thoughts racing. Thanks to Ci, they had them torn and confused, but he doubted it would stay that way for long. Regardless, the plan was now underway. And that involved Vic shutting Lobe out of the game, even if it meant ignoring the instincts crying out at him to reach his father and get him to safety.

  He broke again, right this time, making for the nearest pillar in the same moment that Graymalkin shifted from behind his. The air was alive with the discharge of the energy rifles and swirling clouds of shattered stonework that eddied as Vic surged through it. One bolt passed right by his shoulder, causing a jolt to stab through him, but not slow him. He reached safety again, coughing out dust.