That’s when Cyclops understood. The “hair” on the stout mutant was not actually hair at all, but a deadly covering of porcupinelike quills. He could guess the rest.
“X-Men!” he shouted. “Eyes on Hairbag!”
Razor-tipped quills erupted from Hairbag’s back and flew toward them, as deadly as a hail of arrows. Juggernaut and Rogue wouldn’t be harmed, and if she had heard him shout.
Jean could throw up a telekinetic shield. But Cyclops was on his own.
With a quick optic blast, he tore through the blanket of quills flying toward him. In perfect synchronicity, he pulled up into an aerial somersault, deadly quills flashing past him. When he landed on his feet, Hairbag had already lifted his arms to attempt another attack with the quills jutting from the flesh of his shoulders.
“Playing for keeps, now,” Cyclops mumbled to himself.
He brought Hairbag down hard with an optic blast to the upper chest that knocked the mutant flat on the pavement.
“You killed him!” octopus-face screamed. “You guys aren’t supposed to do that!”
“No one’s supposed to do that,” Cyclops snapped, though he knew that Hairbag was far from dead.
“Your turn!” the woman cried, and her tentacles reached out for him.
No more conversation, Cyclops thought. War required only action. With utmost concentration, he focused his optic beam into a tight, narrow line, and blasted the woman the moment she moved into profile. The blast neatly sliced off two tentacles on the left side of her face, instantly cauterizing the wounds.
Screaming in pain, she looked at Cyclops with agony etched in ever)' line of her face.
“Go away!” he snarled.
She turned and ran.
• * *
“Man,” the Juggernaut said in awe, “that was harsh. You guys aren’t fooling around this time, are you?”
“The stakes have never been this high, Cain,” Jean Grey said beside him. “We’re doing what we have to do, that’s all. Doesn’t mean we enjoy it.”
“Yeah? What about Wolverine?” Cain asked.
Jean shot him a nasty glance and turned to face two feral mutants who were ganging up on her. Cain kept moving, unconcerned. Grey was one lady who could definitely take care of herself.
To his left, Rogue was landing blow after blow on the face, head, chest, and back of the forty-foot giant who called himself Humongous. She didn’t seem to be faring all that well, and Cain figured he ought to lend a hand. First things first, though. He was working with the X-Men, and he knew firsthand that Scott Summers was an effective field commander. Summers wanted him to take down this big drooling moron called Slab. He could do that.
Like Hairball, Slab had been one of Sinister’s Nasty Boys. Cain had heard of them, but never run into them before now. They didn’t seem like much. Slab was over seven feet tall, nearly bald, and ugly as a bulldog but without the charm.
The Juggernaut moved, several mutants tried to stop his progress. He laughed. Obviously, they either didn’t know who he was, or didn’t believe his publicity. Nothing stopped the Juggernaut. He brushed aside the thin black man with the scorpion tail, its stinger striking for his face but hitting only helmet.
Then there was Slab.
“Come on, fiatscan,” Slab crowed. “Slab’s gonna pound your skull.”
Cain nearly laughed out loud.
“Man, I thought you looked stupid,” he said. “Turns out, you’re even dumber than you look! My rep says I ain’t the most intelligent guy in the world, but at least I don’t refer to myself in the third person.”
“Don’t make fun of Slab, buddy,” Slab warned. “You’ll die slower if you do.”
“Oh, shut up,” Cain said, and hammered Slab in the face with a massive fist that rocked his head back so far, Cain figured he’d given the guy whiplash.
Slab grew. Then he hit back, hard. Cain wasn’t in motion, and the blow hurt him. sent him stumbling back several steps.
“Every time you hit Slab, Slab gets stronger, hits back harder,” the mutant said. “Slab gets bigger. You can’t win.”
“That’s the game, huh?” Cain replied. “Well, check this out, dog boy.”
Cain launched himself at Slab, the Juggernaut steaming down on his enemy. He slammed into the mutant and lifted him off the ground, like a linebacker going for a hard tackle. But instead of knocking Slab down, the Juggernaut kept going. There was a massive financial office building just ahead, its walls constructed of thick granite blocks.
The Juggernaut bent low, and rammed Slab, skull first, into the granite side of the building. The stone gave way, some of it crumbling in chunks to the sidewalk. Cain dropped Slab onto the debris.
“You can’t hit me back harder if you’re unconscious,” he said.
* t •
“Keep hitting me, little bug, and when you get tired I can squash you!” Humongous cried in delight.
Rogue cracked him a good one in the left temple, and this time the forty-foot monstrosity actually yowled with pain and reached for his head. Rogue smiled. Good, she thought, it’s about time.
She was almost incomparably strong, and nearly invulnerable, but in spite of all that, Rogue was having a difficult time with Humongous. On the other hand, at least she was keeping him occupied so he could not help the rest of Magneto’s followers.
Humongous was large, but he was also slow and lumbering. If he got hold of her, Rogue suspected the giant might be able to pop her head off as if she were a Pez dispenser. The key, then, was simply not to let him touch her.
Giant hands reached out for her again, and Rogue ducked them, flew in toward his face, and used both fists in a hammer blow that shattered Humongous’s nose. The giant screamed in pain and humiliation, as blood began to flow freely over his lips and chin.
When Rogue shot around behind him, into the shadow cast by his massive form, she noticed something unexpected. Hu-mongous had shrunk at least five feet. The massive mutant clutched his face, blood on his hands, and he growled in rage as he spun, trying to find her.
“Hey, ugly,” a familiar voice boomed. “Down here!”
Rogue and Humongous looked down together, to see Cain Marko, the Juggernaut, running at the giant mutant. His footfalls echoed in the street. Humongous began to stoop, to attempt to snatch up the Juggernaut, but Rogue dashed through the air and struck him in the side of the head. In the moment that she had distracted him, the Juggernaut slammed into Humongous at ground level.
There was a massive crack, and Humongous cried out in pain. Rogue thought the Juggernaut had broken the giant mutant’s leg. Humongous began to fall.
“Uh-uh, sugar, not here,” she said absently.
With all her strength, she grabbed Humongous from behind and hauled him off the ground. Rogue flew quickly to the Hudson River and there, more than one hundred feet above the water, let Humongous fall. In no time, she was in the thick of the battle once more.
* * *
Jean lifted the two feral mutants and sent them crashing through the thick glass windows of a trendy Sixth Avenue eatery. Now she faced down half a dozen mutants who gathered around her in a circle of death. A woman whose hands and scalp were on fire. A boy, barely a teenager, who spit long streams of acid that ate the pavement by Jean’s feet. The man with the scorpion tail, and others.
Simultaneously, they attacked, intending to murder Jean Grey. But Jean wasn’t there, not at all. Her presence was an illusion, telepathically inserted into their minds. Acid burned the scorpion tail, fire scarred a shapeshifter, claws slashed at darkness, and a being of living shadow screamed.
Jean flinched. She hadn’t intended them to injure one another. Though it turned the fight to her favor, it gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. The war between Xavier and Magneto had always been a philosophical one, a Cold
War, with a skirmish here and there. But this was real war, and Jean had quickly discovered that she did not have a taste for it. Not at all.
Several of
the mutants had seen her now, and were attempting to close in again. They were more cautious this time, and she wondered if she could take them all down. She didn’t need to. An optic blast flashed past her, driving the blazing-skulled woman from her feet. Her head cracked against a fire hydrant, and she lay still. Jean checked psionically to see that she was still alive, and then moved on.
“About time you stopped playing around,” she said as Cyclops ran up beside her. “What about the others?”
Before Scott could answer, they heard Cain Marko bellowing.
“I told ya to cut that out!”
They spun in time to see him snag that scorpion tail and whip its owner around several times before slamming him into the side of an abandoned city bus.
“Man, he was drivin’ me up a wall with that stinger!” Marko exclaimed.
“Well,” Scott said, turning his attention back to Jean, “I guess that about does it for the element of surprise.”
“You could say that,” Jean agreed with a weak smile.
“Oh, I’ll go y’all one better than that,” Rogue said as she approached her three comrades.
All three of them turned to look at her. Rogue only pointed in the other direction. The fight had taken them a block and a half farther north, just a stone’s throw from the Empire State Building. Jean knew they should be right on top of Magneto’s base by now. Rogue shouldn’t be surprised if they had met up with more opposition.
That’s what she thought. Before she turned to see what Rogue was pointing at.
The street was literally filled with mutants, separating them from their goal: the Empire State Building and the freedom of the rest of the X-Men. Out in front of the pack were several Acolytes they were already familiar with, including Amelia Voght, the KJeinstock brothers, and Senyaka. But Jean could also see other familiar faces, including other members of the Nasty Boys, several Marauders, the Toad, even the Blob and Pyro, who had recovered too fast from their previous skirmish. Magneto obviously had a healer on his staff.
It was a sea of angry, resolute faces, all dedicated to destroying the X-Men in Magneto’s name.
“Oh, marvelous,” Jean sighed.
“Surrender, X-Men, or be destroyed,” Amelia Voght warned. “You have five seconds to decide.”
Jean and Scott exchanged a knowing glance. Rogue didn’t flinch as she prepared to go on the assault.
“You cannot win against these odds,” Voght continued. “Give yourselves up, live in comfort in an empire ruled by Magneto. It’s your only choice.”
Jean would never have imagined she would see the day, but the Juggernaut spoke for the X-Men, speaking the words that were in all their minds.
“Like hell.”
* * *
Her hand shook, the barrel of the gun wavering at her side. Gabriela Frigerio had never fired a gun before. They’d had no business giving her one, as far as she was concerned. But give her one they had. And it felt strangely comforting in her hand, though she knew that against the mutant hordes that had overtaken Manhattan, one handgun was little better than a slingshot.
But then, there was always David and Goliath to testify to the efficacy of the slingshot.
They moved together, the upstart resistance fighters led by Miguelito Ramos and the group of police officers and other former city employees led by ex-Police Commissioner Wilson Ramos. An odd group, to say the least, but all dedicated to a single cause: the salvation of New York City. Gabi didn’t know what they could do against Magneto. As far as she was concerned, they were powerless. But they might be able to take back City Hall, to become a thorn in Magneto’s side. That would have to be enough.
The mob had thinned in front of City Hall. As had its force of defenders. There were fewer than a dozen police officers now, and three or four people who might have been mutants.
“I recognize that one,” Wilson Ramos said next to her. “He’s one of Magneto’s boys; must be powerful too.”
“Do you want to hold back a bit?” Miguelito asked.
“Nah,” Wilson said after a brief hesitation. “I don’t think it’s going to get any easier, no matter how long we wait.”
“It’s now or never,” Gabi agreed, and the brothers looked at her oddly.
She wondered if they felt as strongly as she how suddenly real the whole thing had become. Up until that moment, it had seemed more like some college protest. But now the moment had come, the time for actual battle, actual bloodshed.
“My God,” she said softly to herself, not bothering to wonder if anyone could hear. “How did we come to this?”
She looked at Michael, at Miguelito and his brother, at Lamarre and all the others, and she wondered how many of them would die in the next few minutes.
“Go!” Wilson Ramos barked into a hand radio.
Several hundred men and women, civilians and police and fire personnel, hustled into the city block around City Hall. On the steps of the venerable building, Magneto’s security force and the citizens of Manhattan interrupted their battle to stare around in astonishment at what amounted to the cavalry.
Gabi saw the momentary uncertainty on every face as they attempted to determine whose side the new arrivals were on.
“Attention, Steven Tyree,” Ramos boomed into a megaphone. “As police commissioner of New York City, I am placing you under arrest. Every law officer answering to Mr. Tyree is also under arrest, as are Magneto and all of his so-called Acolytes. Throw down your weapons, and wait with your hands up for a duly authorized police officer or civilian deputy to take you into custody!”
The mob was elated. The cops still working for Tyree, whom Magneto had appointed commissioner, far less so. Nobody moved.
“Pileggi, Brereton, Willeford, I see all you guys up there,”
Ramos said. “Wambaugh, Caruso ... ah, the hell with it, I’m not here to play Romper Room. Surrender now. You all know the law, and you know you’ve broken it. Bring out Tyree!”
Another pause.
An Asian man wearing the colors of Magneto’s security force stepped forward as if to respond. But when he opened his mouth, rather than speak, the man merely took a deep breath and blew, as if trying to put out a candle.
At first, Gabi thought it was funny. It looked so bizarre. Then a hole appeared in the pay phone in the kiosk on the corner. No explosion, no fire, just a round section of the phone vaporized to nothing. The mutant must have emitted some incredible power from his mouth, a destructive force that eliminated anything in its path until it reached its target:
Wilson Ramos. Who hadn’t noticed the phone being perforated, who waited patiently for some response from once faithful officers.
“Down!” Gabriela cried, and dived on Ramos, dragging him to the pavement a heartbeat before she expected that invisible power to reach him.
The vaporizing funnel bored through the side and engine of a red Chevy Corsica parked behind them, leaving a clean hole they could have looked right through. Gabi saw from Ramos’s face that he had made the connection between the mutant and the destruction.
“Now, that’s bad breath,” he said, though she could see his heart wasn’t in the humor.
He frowned.
“Why aren’t the rest of them attacking?” he asked aloud. “Why hasn’t that other mutant, the guy in charge, ordered an attack?”
“Maybe they’re going to surrender after all?” she suggested.
“Yeah, right!” Lamarre said, startling her. She hadn’t realized he was so close behind her.
“You have three seconds!” Ramos called over the megaphone.
Gabi thought she could see the other mutant, the one Wilson Ramos obviously thought was in charge, shake his head and shrug. He lifted his hands, put them together in a kind of clapping motion.
“Take them down,” he ordered, and concentrated sound erupted from the slightest tap of his hands together, shooting out toward them.
He missed, but across the street behind them, brick walls began to tumble in on themselves
.
“Let’s take back our city!” Ramos shouted over the megaphone.
In a wave, the resistance fighters moved toward the steps of City Hall. "
• • *
A whirlpool of violence swirled in the street in front of the Empire State Building, with the X-Men at its center. Flashes of energy burned through the massive crowds, Magneto’s followers so overcome by their urgent need to defeat the X-Men that they thought nothing of striking down their own comrades just to get at one of Xavier’s people. Already, they were fighting among themselves, which offered some little relief for Scott, Jean, Rogue, and the Juggernaut.
There had been a moment, when they were first confronted by such a huge number of enemies, when Rogue wondered if the Juggernaut would bolt. But Marko stood fast with the X-Men, who had been—who, in fact, still were—his enemies. She had to admire that. You didn’t generally find career criminals who were also stand-up guys.
Then there was no more time for thought, only action, as Magneto’s hordes swarmed in.
Rogue tossed off several attackers, then took to the air, flying to attempt a better view of their circumstances. She ought to have known better. There were a lot of flyers already in the air. Simultaneously, she was buffeted by a bright red, phosphorescent flame, a rainbow-colored laser blast that burned through her costume and singed her flesh, and a hail of tiny darts not much larger than the thorns on a pricker bush.
She let out a cry of pain, surprise, and anger, then glared around at the four flyers closing in on her.
It was easy to tell who was responsible for what. The fire came from a man whose head and neck were intact, but the rest of his body was in flames. The laser from some jerk in a shiny technosuit. The darts flew off a woman with massive insect-type wings, whose body seemed a cross between some kind of bug and plant life.
“They call me Rose,” she called. “You’ll find it difficult to avoid my thorns.”
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