X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  Next came the children, with Scott and Jean bringing up the rear. She had one arm across his shoulders to take the burden off her broken leg.

  After what Storm decided was just shy of forever, they reached the loading bay. They’d felt no more big explosive shocks the past few minutes, but it was clear that something just as bad was taking their place. Dust and small bits of debris were falling from every surface.

  Their plan was to leave the way they had come, out the massive double doors at the far end of the loading bay and then along the spillway to the forest and, ultimately, the Blackbird. It wouldn’t take long, because the moment they were outside Storm planned to take to the air and rocket her way back to the X-Men’s hidden aircraft. She’d be there and back in a matter of minutes, and they’d be free of this terrible place.

  Ten minutes, she prayed to any diety who cared to listen, that’s all they needed. Fifteen, max. Not so hard a thing to ask for, was it? Hey, they’d just saved the world, that ought to be worth a tiny break from the fates.

  The doors were wide open, and as they crossed the broad expanse of the loading bay, the kids commenting excitedly on the smashed and burned-out wrecks they passed along the way, Artie and Jubilation Lee raced ahead, ignoring Storm’s cross “Stop!”

  There was a taste to the air she didn’t like, plus a low-frequency rumble that reminded her of one of the great herds of wildebeest on the African savanna suddenly going stampede. She could see a violence to the eddies and currents around the entrance and beyond that raised the hackles on her neck and made her break into a dead run of her own, filling the room with a bellow that grabbed everyone’s notice. This seemed like a voice that could very well call down thunder.

  “I—said—stop!”

  And they did, right at the bottom of the approach ramp to the doors. As Storm caught up with them, snatching them off their feet and into her arms, her conscious mind caught up with the clues her subconscious had been processing, and she felt almost overwhelmed by an avalanche of despair. The air outside these doors was being assaulted by the leading edge of an air ram, a pressure wave compressed to the point of being an almost solid mass, by the force that was pushing it down this channel. It wasn’t a stampede she was witnessing. The gates to the dam had been opened. The spillway was flooding.

  She saw Jean separate herself from Scott and take a stance at the foot of the ramp, gritting her teeth as the air before her started to shimmer. Her red hair stirred without the slightest breeze and Storm knew that her friend was going to pit the whole of her telekinetic ability against the unimaginable force of the water coming down that huge funnel. Even if she could buy them time to escape the loading bay, almost certainly with the sacrifice of her own life, they’d still have to find some escape route from the complex itself. And if the spillway was flooding, then the dam itself had to have been compromised. Once it collapsed, dumping the whole of Alkali Lake into this valley, no power on Earth—certainly none available right now to the X-Men—would save them.

  A great grinding noise filled the room, and everyone first assumed it had something to do with the onrushing flood, building its own runaway train crescendo outside.

  Then the kids, and Storm, and even Jean, jumped as the double doors slammed shut.

  “Trust me, darlin’,” she heard Logan say, “you don’t want to go out there.” And she turned to find him a short way along the wall, with one fist jammed up tight against a sparking junction box that looked as big as his own chest.

  Then an even more resounding BOOM shook the space, knocking most of the mutants present off their feet as it made the room shudder so hard it felt like a real earthquake. The doors bowed slightly from the impact shock, and water spurted from the central seam with the force of a high-pressure fire hose.

  Snakt!

  Logan retracted his claws, and the kids, who’d never seen him use them, who’d only heard—and mostly mocked—the stories they’d heard from Rogue, stared in silent awe.

  “Everybody here?” he asked. “Everybody okay?”

  His eyes told him the answer to the first, his senses cataloged the rest, and he zeroed in on Jean.

  She didn’t give him a chance to say a word but turned her face to him, to show him her ruined eyes, and said, “We’re fine, Logan.” The fingers of one hand were interlaced with Scott’s. It wasn’t just that she was leaning against Cyclops for support, it was the body language of the way their bodies melted seamlessly together. Even in these dire circumstances, it suggested a relaxed intimacy that spoke volumes about their relationship and the true depth of their feelings.

  “Please,” she told Logan, with a gentle empathy and a plea for understanding that had nothing to do with the words she was actually speaking, “help the professor.”

  He nodded, and let Cyclops half carry her away. She’d made her choice.

  Storm watched him, with full understanding of what had just happened and how he might be feeling. He didn’t try to put a brave face on the moment, or anything like that. His emotions were as plain and primal as Jean’s; he’d never be ashamed of them. Just because she’d chosen Scott as her go-to guy didn’t mean Logan would care for her any less. Or that the decision was final.

  “Come on,” he told everyone, maybe a little more gruffly than he’d intended. The adults chose not to notice. “There’s another way out.”

  The spillway wasn’t enough to save the day or even slow the process of collapse. Quite the contrary. The sudden and tremendous rush of water had the same effect on the underground complex as the earlier explosions. Wherever there was a weak bulkhead, wherever access portals had been left open, wherever doorways failed, water crashed into Stryker’s base, further undermining the foundation of the dam itself.

  The first spiderweb series of cracks began to splinter the face of the dam itself, minute fissures that extended up from the initial breach underground in the generator room. They didn’t look like much, nothing very impressive at all, until it became evident that the only way water could be leaking through them was if they extended clear through to the lake. That meant a crack right through better than ten meters of reinforced concrete.

  Once more, the inexorable laws of physics and hydrodynamics came into play. Water burst through the holes at tremendous pressure, backed by the full weight of a lake miles long, a mile wide just behind the dam, and hundreds of feet deep. This water ground away at the concrete as it poured through the cracks. With every passing second, as the very structure of the dam eroded, those cracks widened. More water escaped. More of the dam was washed away. The force of the water increased, thereby accelerating the process.

  For all intents and purposes, though the X-Men didn’t know it yet, they were out of time.

  Well clear of the complex, but still below the dam, the team emerged from Stryker’s escape tunnel. Logan pointed them over the crest of the hill to the helipad, and Storm hurried ahead to prep the vehicle for takeoff.

  They found her on the edge of the trees, staring at the empty platform.

  “Logan?”

  “Son of a bitch,” he growled, and charged across the clearing.

  They caught up with him where he’d left Stryker. Logan was kneeling by the body, tapping one extended claw against the chains that had wrapped themselves so tightly around the man’s throat he’d been virtually decapitated.

  They didn’t need an explanation, but he provided one anyway. “Magneto.”

  And again, with dark and deadly feeling, “That son of a bitch!”

  “After what he’d done, Logan,” Xavier said quietly, “small wonder he wouldn’t face me, or any X-Man.”

  “Charley,” Logan growled, “you don’t understand—”

  “If you say so.”

  Logan looked up and around, back in the direction of the dam, reacting to cues only his enhanced senses could perceive. Well, not quite his alone, because Storm was looking, too.

  They started up the slope together, intent on reaching the top of the hill
and having their eyes confirm the disaster that had befallen them. What they would do next was anybody’s guess.

  At last a chunk of facing larger than a freight car bulged outward from the body of the dam. Girders and rebar held it somewhat in place for a span of seconds as the stream of escaping water erupted into a raging torrent, but the stresses it endured went far beyond the limits imagined by any of the design team. Steel snapped like breaking strings, and these countless tons of concrete went spinning along the crest of a brand-new waterfall as lightly as a flat stone skimming the surface of a tranquil lake. It flew through the air at a slight angle and shattered against one of the pump houses with the force of a good-sized bomb.

  In its wake, cracks as wide as roadways exploded across the face of the dam, rapidly reaching all the way up to the summit so that the next section to go involved a significant area of the wall. All pretense of integrity was gone. One collapse triggered the next as inexorably as a falling line of dominos, so that by the time Storm and Logan, with the irrepressible Artie close behind, reached the crest of the hill with its unobstructed view, there was virtually no dam left to see.

  Just countless billions of gallons of water, thundering down the valley straight toward them.

  “What is it?” Artie asked in breathless disbelief.

  “Alkali Lake,” Logan told him. “All of it.”

  He turned to Storm. “How many can you carry?” he demanded. She wasn’t sure, and said so. “How about the damn elf, what’s-his-name? How many can he carry, how far can he jump? And Jean, her mind thing, the teke, can she use it to make some kind of boat?” He was speaking in a rush, hand on her arm, Artie—who for once kept his mouth shut—tucked under his other arm as he propelled her down the slope. They had maybe a minute to act, and he wasn’t about to waste any of it.

  “What about you?” Storm demanded of him.

  He snorted with derisive laughter. He could take care of himself, even in a flash flood of such immensity.

  The rescue was doable—it had to be; they all knew that any other outcome was utterly unacceptable. They didn’t have to go far, just clear of the wave front.

  Just then, a tremendous wind blasted the clearing from above. It was too soon for the pressure ram leading the flood to reach them, and this downdraft was accompanied by the shriek of high-performance jet engines that sounded definitely not in a good mood.

  * * *

  Skimming the surface of the treetops, when it wasn’t actually plowing through them, the Blackbird sideslipped through the air toward them with a pale and terrified Rogue doing her best at the controls. All around her in the cockpit, displays flashed red and presented ominous messages in both text and voice, telling her in unmistakable terms that she was not flying the big jet at all properly or well. She couldn’t help herself, she yelled right back at the telltales, agitation bringing her lower Mississippi accent to the fore with a vengeance. “I’m doing the best I can, damn it! Leave me the hell alone!”

  They didn’t listen. They kept right on yammering—about airspeed, flight profile, engine temperatures, hydraulic pressure, ground proximity, the landing gear. At least the last warning was something that made sense. She slapped the big lever on the front panel, the same way she’d seen Storm and Jean do it, and was rewarded by the hollow thunk of the struts lowering from their wheel wells. Unfortunately, that also screwed up the plane’s balance and performance, creating additional drag that she wasn’t expecting and didn’t know how to cope with.

  One of the main bogies snagged the crown of a fir, creating drag enough to pivot the plane right around and tip it to one side. Rogue tried to compensate, twisting the control wheel and applying power to the throttles, but she overdid both elements so that when the plane wrenched itself loose it slipped immediately into a flat spin that overwhelmed the ability of the vertical thrusters to compensate.

  Fortunately, the plane only had about twenty meters to fall, not a lot of distance for a vehicle whose length was close to double that.

  As everyone below scrambled for cover, the Blackbird made about half a revolution—Rogue sensibly chopped the throttles to zero—before the impact. It was a hard landing, and the only saving grace was that it landed in deep snow instead of on frozen earth. Even better, while the leading edge of the port wing buried itself in a patch of ground that was fully exposed, that ground was nowhere near solid. For this was where Pyro had collapsed when the initial Cerebro wave had struck. His wildly out-of-control power had melted all the snow for three meters and more around him. All that water had soaked straight into the ground, resulting in a boggy quagmire of mud.

  The good news: The wing hit without substantial damage.

  The bad news: Like any vehicle lodged in deep mud, it was likely stuck fast.

  As heads all around the clearing cautiously poked up to make sure all was well, the Blackbird’s main hatch cycled open, and Bobby Drake emerged.

  “What’re you waiting for?” he yelled. “The dam’s collapsed, we’ve got to go! Hurry!”

  Storm was first in with Jubilee and the children. While the others came aboard behind her, she scrambled to the flight deck.

  Rogue hadn’t let go of the yoke, she was sitting stock-still, teeth chattering, pale as Storm’s own hair, convinced that she’d doomed them all.

  Storm took a moment she couldn’t really afford to ruffle the young girl’s hair. “You did great, Rogue. I am so proud of you.”

  * * *

  Aft, Cyclops helped Jean into one of the passenger seats, but as he reached over to fasten her harness, she waved him away.

  “I’ve got it,” she told him, and proceeded to buckle herself in without any hesitation or difficulty. Cyclops spared a quick glance to make sure the others were doing the same, then followed Storm to the flight deck. Rogue hadn’t moved.

  He crouched down and took her by both shoulders.

  “It’s okay, kiddo,” he told her. “Storm and I, we’ll handle things. Grab yourself a seat and strap in.”

  Convulsively, she released her harness and popped out of the chair, making sure not to touch either Cyclops or Storm as she sidled past them and rushed to where Bobby Drake was waiting.

  Cyclops took her place, fidgeting a moment as he discovered that the sheepskin-covered seat back was so ice cold he could feel it even through his insulated uniform. There was the thinnest sheen of hoarfrost on the yoke as well, something he was used to finding wherever Bobby Drake hung out.

  “What the hell—” he muttered, then relegated the concern to the back burner of his mind as something to worry about and deal with later.

  He didn’t waste time with preliminaries but initiated an emergency hot start. The engines obligingly spooled up to speed . . .

  . . . and then went silent.

  He started again, Storm gently manipulating the throttles, both of them watching the displays like hungry hawks to make sure that this time there’d be no loss of power.

  “Thrusters four and six are out,” she reported. It wasn’t anything Rogue had done; this was left over from the Air Force missile that had knocked them from the sky.

  “We should still be able to fly,” Cyclops told her.

  “If we were level, absolutely. But we’re stuck fast, and the thrusters we need to punch us loose are the ones we’re missing. There’s not enough power available to pull us out of the ground!”

  “You got a better idea?”

  She advanced the throttles, and the great aircraft began to tremble violently. Seeing a clutch of tree trunks flipping toward them through the air, Storm reflexively ducked her head into her shoulders, whistling as they bounced harmlessly past. They’d been torn loose by the flood and pitched on ahead. The mutants had only a few moments before the water was on them. It was now or never.

  Xavier sensed the children’s agitation and used his telepathy to ease their fear. If this was indeed the end, he would make sure that, for them, it would be peaceful and without pain.

  Nightcrawler cl
utched his rosary and offered up the most heartfelt prayers he knew.

  Jean closed her broken eyes and went to that place within her where the celestial song could be heard. Now, more than ever before, that strength was needed. In her mind’s eye she rose once more from the ashes of creation and spread wide her arms, turning them to wings of fire and glory, that the Blackbird might fly, that these friends—who she loved more than her own life—would live.

  In the base’s loading bay, the closed doors finally gave way under the onslaught of this latest and most terrible fall of water, together with a major stretch of ceiling as well. Like starving hounds after a deer, floods poured down every corridor.

  Far below, Yuriko Oyama lay unmoving in her cocoon of adamantium at the bottom of the augmentation tank. The room was mostly in ruins, but there were redundancy systems galore, and that meant some of the monitors were still active. The bionics that replaced much of Yuriko’s purely organic components came with their own dedicated suite of sensors, and even though the images on the screens were wobbly and shot through with static, it was evident that she was still alive.

  Not that it mattered. Encased in an adamantium shell, she was wholly incapable of movement. She wasn’t going anywhere of her own volition or under her own steam.

  A few moments later, as the flood waves reached this section of the complex, the whole question became moot. Walls shattered from the torrential impact, and that, in turn, collapsed the entire ceiling. In a heartbeat, the lab was filled with water, and the augmentation chamber itself, together with the Weapon X tank, was buried under hundreds of tons of steel and rock and earth.

  Elsewhere, the same happened in the Cerebro chamber.

  Outside, an avalanche of water hundreds of feet high cut a remorseless swath through the valley below Alkali Lake, annihilating every trace of the complex that had been constructed beneath the dam. The pressure wave of air that preceded it made trees that were meters thick bend almost double for the few seconds it took the water to reach them and snap them like kindling. Mist and foam rose from that leading edge of the wave, partially obscuring the awful fury of the event and the devastation it was causing.