X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  But somewhere along the way, he’d decided not to care.

  He wasn’t right, then.

  This . . . wasn’t right now.

  Could anything be done about it?

  “Professor!”

  The chamber that housed Dark Cerebro shuddered from the tremendous shock wave. Overhead, the smooth curve of the dome came to an abrupt end as the vicious torque sheared through a line of retaining bolts and rivets. With a shriek of tortured metal, whole sections of ceiling plating collapsed, some falling straight past the gallery platform to and on the floor below with a resounding crash, while others tumbled lazily through the air as potentially deadly chunks of flying debris, especially dangerous for those like Nightcrawler and Storm who were essentially oblivious to them.

  For that fateful moment, though, all of 143’s illusions slipped—the setting reverted to its normal dimensions while the integrity of the holographic globe spasmed with static. Xavier coughed and started to raise his hands to remove his helmet.

  But the moment was all the time he had, and it wasn’t enough. The creature in the other wheelchair once more became the girl. The globe once more grew to the size of the planet itself. The room remained whole and intact, with none of those present allowed to have the slightest inkling of their danger while Charles Xavier unwittingly continued to bring about the annihilation of the human race.

  The lights on the globe burned far brighter than before; Cerebro’s hum was louder and more pervasive. Mutant 143 had accelerated the process.

  Logan felt the explosion before he heard it, as a seismic transmission through the earth and a pressure wave a fraction of an instant ahead of the sound.

  “What the hell was that?”

  Stryker didn’t answer at once, mainly out of defiance.

  “Damn you, Stryker,” Logan roared, grabbing the man up by the shirtfront, “what’s happening? What is it?”

  “The foundation of the dam has been compromised,” he told Logan. “Some kind of rupture. Started in the turbines, and now it’s spreading to the intake towers. The dam is releasing water into the spillway, trying to relieve the pressure . . . tying to stop the process . . . but it’s too late! In a matter of minutes, we’ll all be under water.”

  Logan looked back at the escape tunnel.

  Stryker grabbed him, a drowning man to a life preserver: “Still want answers, Wolverine? Like how old you really are? If Logan is even your real name? If you have a family?” He knew the words were having an effect, and he glared at the mutant, willing him to listen, and to obey.

  “Or,” he said forcefully, putting all his strength into this final ploy, “is she still alive?” That one, that implication, hit the mark, dead center. “Then why don’t we just get in the helicopter and fly away. I give you my word, Wolverine, come with me and I’ll tell you everything. You owe these people nothing. You’re a survivor, you always have been!”

  Stryker gasped in pain as Logan delivered a wicked punch to the kidneys, one that was meant to hurt. He yanked Stryker close and tucked a fist under his chin, making his threat plain.

  “I thought I was just an animal, Billy,” he said.

  Stryker flinched at the snikt of the claws extending from their housings and thought right then that he was dead. When he realized a second later that he wasn’t, he had to face the shame of tears staining his cheeks, and far worse staining his trousers back and front. The outside claws bracketed his cheeks, close enough to dent the skin but not yet break it. The middle claw remained retracted.

  Logan was smiling.

  “With claws.”

  In the hallway outside Stryker’s Cerebro chamber, with the kids stirring nervously as the floors and walls trembled enough to send a scattering of dust and some random splashes of water falling from the ceiling, Jean found her right hand closing into a fist. She felt a tension up her forearm, like a spring-loaded mechanism about to release, and her teeth bared fractionally in delight.

  “Logan,” she said, almost exclusively to herself, but mentally it was a full-throated shout.

  He heard her, as if she were standing right beside him.

  “Jean,” he said, speaking as quietly as she and just as sure of being heard.

  “Just tell me what you need, Wolverine. Tell me what you need. Tell me what you want!”

  It was a simple choice: his past, or—and here Logan looked up toward the dam, which still showed no outward effects of the series of explosions deep underground; to the naked, untutored eye, it looked like it would stand forever—his future. To Stryker, the two had to be mutually exclusive. Maybe that was true?

  Logan raised his fist, forcing the other man to rise to his feet, to tiptoes, both of them knowing that what he wanted more than anything was to pop that third claw and use Stryker’s severed head as a soccer ball.

  Stryker winced again at the distinctive sound of metal on metal, but this time the claws weren’t extending. They had been retracted.

  “I have what I need,” Logan told him.

  Before he could fall, Logan pitched him up against a nearby anchor post, where chains were used to hold the helicopters secure against the worst of the local winter storms. In a matter of seconds he had Stryker wrapped tight.

  “If we die, you die.”

  As Logan raced back to the tunnel, Stryker pulled angrily on the chains and shouted after him: “There are no answers that way, Wolverine!”

  A sudden rattle of metal caught his attention, and his eyes dropped to the chains. He thought at first it was some ground tembler related to the explosions that were shaking the dam, but he was wrong. His hands were trembling.

  No big deal, he told himself, residual effect of his confrontation with Wolverine. He was scared, now he could afford to show it.

  He sneezed, and the surprise outburst sent starbursts of pain through his skull that were worse than when Wolverine had punched him. He saw blood on the chains and snow in front of him. He wiped his face on a sleeve and left a scarlet trail that looked as though he’d used a decent and well-saturated paintbrush. But when he stuck out his tongue, he tasted a steady flow of it from his nose.

  His face went pale as the snow, and a chill colder than the absolute of space closed around his heart.

  “Impossible,” he breathed, and found himself wishing the mutant had used his claws.

  That end at least would have been quick.

  Alicia Vargas sat trembling on the floor of the Oval Office, her back against one of the two sofas that bracketed the presidential seal that was worked into the carpet. Ten minutes ago she’d been fine, and then it was as if she’d been knifed and gutted like a fish. She’d never felt such pain and thought, in that first rush of agony and terror, that all the nuns’ stories of Hell had reared up to claim her. She was dimly aware of the President calling for help, of other agents and staffers laying her on the couch, making way for the medics and doctors . . .

  . . . and then, as suddenly as it had struck, the pain went away. She felt fine. She was making apologies all around, her boss insisting on a full debriefing, someone mentioning what they all feared, that this was some new kind of mutant attack . . .

  . . . and then, everyone around her dropped, pretty much the same way she had. She felt fine, but they were dying, and that staffer’s offhand remark about mutants took on a whole new coloration that made her want to flee the building, that made her wish she had died moments ago. She was dying, they were fine. Now they were dying and she felt great. Did that mean, God forbid, she was a mutant?

  She decided then and there it didn’t matter. She was an agent of the United States Secret Service, assigned to the protective detail of the President. That made him her sole concern.

  She drew her weapon from its holster and levered herself across the floor, collecting a couple more guns along the way. She couldn’t quite muster enough strength yet to stand. The President had collapsed behind his desk and lay partially covered by his chair. With a convulsive heave, Alicia shoved it clear and, b
racing her back against the wall, moved it to where she had a clean line of sight of both entrances. As gently as she could, she gathered the President’s head into her lap, keeping her own Glock in hand while laying the other ones aside—but keeping them in quick and easy reach—to use a handkerchief to wipe his face of the blood that was now leaking from nose and eyes.

  “Alicia,” he choked. “My God, what’s happening?”

  “Sir, I don’t know,” she told him. “But I’m here, I’m okay, I’ll keep you safe.”

  George McKenna didn’t care about himself in that instant, because he knew Alicia’s words were a lie. He didn’t matter anymore, not as President, not even as a man; the only roles that had any substance were husband and father, and the bitterness he felt at this terrible moment was at being so far from those he loved. And even though he had no real hope of a miracle, he prayed for his wife, he prayed with all his heart and those coherent thoughts that remained to him for his children, that they be spared this awful end. He asked for mercy. . . .

  Below the pontiff’s balcony, three Vatican and CitiRoma ambulances stood on the periphery of St. Peter’s Square. Some among the crowd gathered below had apparently been taken ill just before the pope’s appearance. He’d signaled a secretary to make the proper inquiries, then proceeded with the day’s events.

  Now that handful of people were the only ones left standing, on the plaza and inside the Vatican itself. Elisabeth Braddock, who was taking a free day before driving to Milan to showcase Giorgio Armani’s couture line for the fall show, picked herself up off the gurney and carefully stepped off the back of the ambulance. There was blood on her face and on her new dress—linen, expensive, designed exclusively for her by Kay Cera and now utterly ruined—and her shapely lips curled as she saw more pouring from the noses and eyes and ears of everyone in sight.

  Bracing herself for what she knew was out there, Betsy opened the gates to her own mind and cast a telepathic net out across the plaza, hoping to find some clue to the cause of this mass affliction. She staggered as if she’d been physically struck and grabbed desperately for the handrail on the back of the ambulance to keep from falling. It was worse, so much worse, than she had imagined.

  This wasn’t just happening here in Vatican City. People were dropping throughout Rome itself.

  She thanked her stars her mutant power had limits, sensing that no matter how far she cast her perceptions she’d just find more of the same.

  Only the people in the ambulances appeared unaffected. Yet initially, they’d been the ones who were struck down by what was essentially the same effect. She knew one of the others was a mutant. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put the rest of the pieces together. Someone had tried to take out mutants, possibly the world over. And now those tables had been turned.

  “No,” she breathed. “No, please no! Don’t let this be happening. For God’s sake, for mercy’s sake—stop!”

  Her pleas fell on deaf ears, or perhaps they had just been drowned out by the screams of the multitude as extinction reached out to claim them.

  This was Bobby’s fault, Ronny Drake knew that for a fact. His brother must have figured out that Ronny had called the cops and this was some kind of mutie revenge, only he never dreamed his brother could be so cruel as to actually kill him. Brothers were supposed to look out for each other, that’s what Mom and Dad always said, that’s the way Bobby used to act before he went away to that damn school. Ronny was sobbing through the pain, clutching at his bedspread, calling weakly for his parents, why couldn’t they hear, why didn’t they answer? He’d never been so scared, he’d never understood before this moment how awful and all-encompassing a thing real fear could be. He grabbed for every breath, counted every heartbeat, cherished every thought, weighing them all against scenes from the movies and TV shows he’d seen, the video games he’d played. He knew this wasn’t make believe, he knew there was no reboot, he didn’t want to die, he said that over and over and over again, hoping repetition would guarantee his supplication being heard by the Almighty.

  He was sobbing, and wailing, making hard, racking noises that tore at his throat and gut as hard as the energy waves that caused them. His face was streaked with blood, and it had splashed all across his pillow and sheets and the wall beyond. His vision was smeared and he expected to go blind before the end, he wished the end would come quickly, anything to take away the pain.

  He told his brother he was sorry.

  He wished he was a mutant, too, so at least they’d be together. And, with his life reducing fast to flickering embers, he found the capacity to hate Charles Xavier with all his young and passionate heart, blaming Xavier for stealing Bobby away from the home that had raised him, the parents who loved him, the brother who so desperately needed him.

  On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, hundreds of traders lay screaming. . . .

  A thousand feet below the Pacific, the crew of the fleet ballistic missile submarine Montana lay screaming. . . .

  A hundred fifty miles above the continental United States, the seven astronauts comprising the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor stood in silence as their commander tried to reestablish contact with the ground. They’d been in the middle of routine housekeeping traffic with Mission Control at Houston’s Johnson Space Center when they’d heard a succession of increasingly garbled outcries and what sounded like screams.

  After that, nothing.

  “I say again, Houston, do you read? Endeavor to Houston, do you read?” The mission commander switched channels on the selector. “CapCom, do you read?” Switched again. “Edwards flight control, do you read?” One more time. “Cheyenne Base, do you read? NORAD ops, this is Endeavor, please respond.” And finally, switching to 121.5, the international distress frequency: “Any station, any station, please respond. For God’s sake,” Peter Corbeau said, “is anybody there?”

  The only answer was the static of an open carrier wave.

  As far as they knew, they were all alone. And possibly the only human beings left alive.

  Stryker wanted to scream, to shriek, to howl, but he couldn’t. His mind, his body, his soul felt like they had all been snagged by monstrous barbed fishhooks that were now pulling away in every direction, determined to tear him apart. Something had gone terribly wrong. The only answer that made sense to him was that somehow the Cerebro wave had been reprogrammed to affect not mutants, but baseline humans.

  All his work, all his planning, all his sacrifice—all for nothing.

  With the whole world in his grasp, no power on earth could persuade Jason to stop. Strange that, after all this time referring to the boy as Mutant 143, Stryker could only think of him now by the name he’d given him. His father’s name. It didn’t seem . . . proper to call him anything else. As if this moment, with Stryker himself facing death, compelled him to accord his son the dignity, the identity, the . . . humanity that had been denied through the whole of his adult life. And Stryker felt a pang of grief, of misery, at the memory of the first time he’d held the boy, less than five minutes old, and marveled at how small and precious a gift he was. That had been Stryker’s moment of sublime hope, when he had sworn to keep his boy safe, to stand by him no matter what. There’d been no hint then of what was to come, just this small and achingly vulnerable miracle who was the recipient of all the love that William and Karen Stryker had to give.

  Ironically, humanity’s only hope was now the dam. The shocks that set the ground to trembling were coming faster and stronger as water punched through the lowest levels of the complex like a pile driver, each collapsing section further undermining the foundation of the dam itself. Its collapse would destroy the complex and bury Jason. Stryker was no structural engineer—he couldn’t build things worth a damn—but he’d spent a professional lifetime perfecting the art of destruction. Regardless, he was doomed, but survival for the world could now be measured in minutes.

  Then a new but terribly familiar voice turned even that small hope to ashes
.

  “William,” Magneto said, greeting him as an old friend, his rich and cultured English accent rolling the syllables of his name like a tiger savoring its prey.

  Stryker glared up at him.

  “How . . . good to see you again,” Magneto continued as if he genuinely meant it.

  Wolverine hadn’t searched him, hadn’t noticed the backup gun Stryker wore in an ankle holster. Molded plastic with plastic bullets that could kill a man as effectively as metal, designed to be totally impervious to Magneto’s power.

  Stryker grabbed for it, faster than he’d ever moved in his life.

  Magneto let him clear the gun from its holster and almost—but not quite—bring it to bear before he used his power to wrap a length of chain around Stryker’s gun hand like a whip, yanking it aside just as Stryker pulled the trigger. There was a flat report, and the bullet went way wide, into the trees. Mystique quickly stepped forward and wrenched it from Stryker’s grasp, twirling it around her finger like a cowboy as she sauntered over to the helicopter and climbed aboard, leaving Magneto and Stryker to make their final farewells in private.

  Magneto smiled.

  “It seems that we keep running into each other,” he said. “Mark my words, it will never happen again.”

  Another length of chain wrapped itself around Stryker’s throat as Magneto pronounced his final sentence: “Survival of the fittest, Mr. Stryker.”

  Storm and Nightcrawler stood within Cerebro, and as far as they were concerned nothing whatsoever was happening. The great machine was silent.