He knew it was irrational. Jean, Logan, and the rest of the X-Men were ever}' bit as dedicated and competent as he was. No one could ask for better teammates. Yet try as he might, he’d never been able to shake the feeling completely that it was up to him to fix everything. Maybe it had something to do with helplessly witnessing the deaths of his parents. Or going through life with eyes that could kill with a single unshielded glance.
Jean gazed at the mini-Cerebro for half a minute, then grimaced. “Still nothing.”
“Then we’ll just have to keep hunting,” Wolverine said with a growl, and Scott heard the thought from him: Is she going to be totally useless this time out? Normally, Jean tried scrupulously to respect the privacy of other people’s minds, but occasionally, especially when she was tired and her shields were a little shaky, she caught a stray flash of thought anyway, and that was what had happened now. The perception had even jumped from her mind to Scott’s.
He could feel that her feelings were hurt. He was furious, so much so that he nearly forgot that the short man was his friend. For an instant, it was as if they were all back in the old days, when Wolverine baited him at every turn, and sometimes only his commitment to providing the kind of leadership Professor Xavier expected restrained him from pulverizing the obnoxious little jerk with his optic blasts.
Take it easy, said Jean, mind to mind. He didn ’t mean it. I could feel that he was sorry as soon as he thought it. He's just worried and worn out like we are.
I guess, Scott replied, but for the moment at least, resentment still crawled inside him. He ordered himself to put it aside and focus on the mission.
The telepathic exchange had taken only a second. Oblivious to it, Logan turned to Laurel. ‘ ‘Of the three of us, only Jeannie can fly. She could carry us with her, but over time it would wear her out. It would help a lot if we could get our hands on a car.”
Laurel pulled a key ring from the pocket of her fa
Kitty was somewhat relieved that the Gypsy was bet
C::>
“I guess I understand,” said Rogue slowly, as matr
Laurel pulled a key ring from the pocket of her faded black jeans. “Take my Blazer. Just don’t let it get blown up by a death ray or anything.”
Wolverine gave her a smile that momentarily filled his grim features with warmth. “Deal. And after this mess is over, I’ll treat you to the best Italian food in Natchez.”
She smiled back. “How did you know I like Italian?”
He tapped the side of his nose. “I know what you had for lunch.” His grin fading, turned back to his teammates. “Let’s
go-”
Heading into town, their windshield wipers unable ever to quite clear the pounding rain from the glass, they passed solid lines of cars crawling in the opposite direction. Hoping for a news broadcast and a weather update, Scott attempted to switch on the radio, only to find that it didn’t work.
In Natchez proper, to his surprise, the downpour was even harder. Some streets were already flooded, with abandoned vehicles, their tires completely submerged, protruding from the streaming gray water like islands. At one point, as they cautiously crested a hill, the X-Men saw an old white VW bug floating along the submerged cross street below toward an overflowing drainage canal. The driver, an elderly woman with a red scarf tied over her silvery curls, sat helplessly weeping behind the wheel. Jean gazed at the little car and it levitated above the current, drifted part way up the hill, and set down gently on dry ground. The old woman scrambled out and looked wildly about, no doubt seeking the cause of her miraculous deliverance. Scott turned the Blazer around and headed back the way he’d come.
Periodically Jean asked him to stop, and they all climbed out into the miserable weather. While Scott and Logan peered about, looking for they knew not what, she scanned, with and without the mini-Cerebro. Scott was no expert on psionics— he suspected that you couldn’t be if you weren’t a telepath yourself—but he knew as much as any non-psi did, and theoretically, Jean should have been able to scan just as effectively in a moving vehicle as standing still, or under a roof as opposed to beneath the open sky. But if she presently felt otherwise, then that was the truth for her, and he’d do his best to accommodate her.
Not that it was helping so far. He fought against the urge to use his Global Comm-Stat Unit to phone the Professor in his hotel room in Japan, where he was scanning for Ororo and Rogue himself, and ask how he was faring. The interruption would only break his mentor’s concentration. Either Charles or one of the two X-Men with him would unquestionably contact them immediately if he succeeded.
In the back seat, something rasped. Scott glanced over his shoulder. A thin brown cheroot in his ntouth, Wolverine was scratching the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail, but it wouldn’t ignite. Grunting in irritation, he dropped it on the floor and tried another, with no better results.
A third match finally lit, but at the same moment Jean twisted in her seat. “Please,” she said irritably, “not while we’re cooped up in here and I’m trying to concentrate.” Scott was a little surprised. Neither he nor she were smokers, but ordinarily Logan’s secondhand smoke didn’t bother her. A slight, virtually reflexive application of her psychokinesis served to keep it away.
In the rearview mirror, Cyclops saw Logan’s face twist into a glower. “Fine,” he growled. “Lord knows, it seems like you need all the help you can—” He sat up straight. “I hear a whole bunch of tracks. They’ll be moving across that intersection in a second.”
Sure enough, an olive-colored track with a white star on the door rolled out of the cross street ahead. In the back rode twenty soldiers wearing helmets and raincoats, with M16 assault rifles and M60 light machine guns in their hands. Some stood with heads lowered, their shoulders hunched against the driving rain, but others were peering alertly about.
Seven more such vehicles followed the first. “The Army.” said Scott as the end of the convoy rumbled by.
“What was your first clue?” Logan replied. Cyclops struggled to contain an angry retort.
“I suppose they’re here to help with the flood control.” said Jean.
“You figure they’re going to shoot the water with all that firepower?” the Canadian asked.
“They probably brought weapons to prevent looting,” said Cyclops.
“Maybe, but there’s something about them, an edginess . .. But I guess a kid in uniform could get edgy about going head to head with a natural disaster. Hell with it. Let’s find ’Roro and Rogue.”
Their next stop was beside a pharmacy. Once, a red-and white-striped awning had hung above the door and display window, but the storm had stripped most of it away. Only tatters remained, snapping in the wind.
Jean made another fruitless scan. Scott wondered if the mini-Cerebro in her hand could possibly be defective also, even though it appeared to be working fine. Then Logan said, “One o’clock.”
Scott turned. Its propulsion system droning softly, a dull gray, armored hovercraft, roughly the shape of a giant bathtub though broader at the stern than at the prow, was cruising over the city about two hundred feet above the ground. The flanged muzzle of some sort of heavy weapon, perhaps an energy projector, jutted from the nose.
The X-Men had been strafed by high-tech airships too many times to remain in the open. As one, they sought cover by pressing themselves against the wall of the pharmacy. Scott took hold of his glasses, ready to lift them up and fire if the need arose. But the hovercraft simply flew over them and continued on its way, fading into the downpour and the gloom.
“Look familiar?” Logan asked.
Scott nodded. Like his teammate, he made a point of keeping current on what the armed services of the world were flying—besides which, he recognized the stylized logo on the hovercraft’s bow. “SAFE.”
SAFE was an acronym for Strategic Action For Emergencies, a relatively new federal agency. Valerie Cooper, their primary source inside the Washington bureaucracy, had briefed t
hem on the organization’s agenda, and the X-Men had encountered a few of its operatives in Washington during the hearings for the Emergency Intervention Act. “SAFE wouldn’t be involved in flood control,” said Jean, brushing at a stray strand of her auburn mane, which, her hat notwithstanding, had gradually become almost as wet as the hair plastered to Scott’s head. “Their job is to deal with paranormal threats to the nation.”
“Which means the feds have turned out in force to hunt for some kind of super-villain,” said Logan. “Whatever it is, it’s got to be tied in to Rogue and Storm disappearing. So we need to find out what the government knows.”
Scott nodded. “I agree.” As a rule, the X-Men preferred to steer clear of the authorities, an understandable wariness considering that Washington, in the throes of one outbreak of antimutant hysteria or another, had sometimes declared them outlaws and attempted to hunt them down. But on other occasions, generally when in desperate need of the kind of help that only superhumans could provide, government officials had given them tolerance and even cooperation. And considering that SAFE was patrolling Natchez, it certainly looked as if they might welcome assistance now. “Let’s find someone we can talk to.”
Cyclops drove on, forcing himself, despite his impatience, to go slowly enough to cope with the poor visibility and slick pavement. After three more blocks, he saw red and blue lights flickering in the gray veils of rain ahead. “This looks promising,” he said.
“Could be,” Logan said, “assuming that the local boys know what the feds do.”
Scott didn’t want the police to see the X-Men driving up in Laurel Smith’s car. If their friend was ever linked to the team, it could well endanger her life. He pulled the vehicle over to the curb. The tires threw up a fan of filthy water from the gutter.
The mutants looked warily about. When he was sure no one was watching, Scott squirmed out of his trenchcoat, closed his eyes, removed his glasses, reached over his shoulder, and pulled up his blue mask. Attached to the cloth was his golden visor with its ruby quartz aperture. The device, another of Xavier’s inventions, helped him to direct his optic blast with pinpoint accuracy, an invaluable advantage in combat. Thanks to the controls built into his gloves, he could even control the visor without touching it.
Wolverine rid himself of his hat and oilskin and pulled on his own cowl, a yellow mask with a pair of curved, black, pointed projections that swept up over his ears, making his head at least vaguely resemble that of his animal namesake. Jean merely willed it and, with a coruscation of sparks, her civilian clothing became a formfitting emerald outfit with shining golden accessories: boots that rose nearly to her hips, gloves that stretched halfway up her forearms, and a long sash knotted around her waist. A stylized golden bird gleamed on her chest, at the base of a V where the green fabric yielded to black.
The three X-Men climbed from the Blazer and headed up the street. In a few seconds, they were close enough to the flashing emergency lights to see what was going on. Three Natchez Police Department black-and-whites had stopped to sort out a five-vehicle pileup. Scott was pleased to observe that no ambulances or people with serious injuries were in view. The mutants could approach without fear of interrupting any critical, life-saving activities.
“Excuse me, officers,” Cyclops called. “We’re the X-Men, and we need to speak with you.”
Startled, all the people near the crumpled cars, the three policemen and seven civilians alike, jerked around to gape at them. Then the officers snatched for the pistols in their holsters. Some of the civilians stood frozen, while others screamed and spun around to flee.
One policeman, a thin, long-legged guy with dark sideburns, pointed his automatic—a Smith and Wesson Model 659 by the look of it—at Scott. Seeing that the cop was about to pull the trigger, the mutant fired a blaze of crimson power from his visor. The tightly focused beam bashed the gun from the officer’s hand and spun him like a top, his shot firing harmlessly into the ground between them.
Another cop shot at Phoenix, but the bullets glanced harmlessly from the telekinetic shield she willed into being around herself. Suddenly the policeman flopped like a rag doll. His eyes rolled back, his knees buckled, and he fell, splashing up water. She’d tagged him with one of her “mental bolts,” an aggressive application of her telepathy that could stun most people into helplessness.
The remaining officer fired at Wolverine from behind a bronze-colored Seville with a crumpled fender. Logan simply charged the gunman, zigzagging unpredictably, depending on his lightning reflexes, inhuman senses, combat skills, and, should all else fail, adamantium-reinforced skeleton and mutant healing factor to preserve him from serious harm. Unscathed by the hail of bullets, he sprang over the roof of the Cadillac and carried the policeman to the ground.
Scott heard the ratcheting clack of someone pumping a round into the chamber of a shotgun. Pivoting, he saw a heavyset man in a windbreaker and overalls, one of the civilians who hadn’t run away, pointing the weapon at Wolverine. The guy must have grabbed it out of his car.
Cyclops fired his optic blast at the man but, to his own surprise, missed by a hair. The shotgun flashed and boomed.
Logan could almost certainly have simply tumbled clear of the blast, but then it would have hit the policeman he was crouching on top of. Maintaining his grip on the officer, he rolled with him, and when he surged to his feet, his hairy, muscular right arm was bleeding. He snarled, his gleaming, adamantium claws leaped from the steel sockets on the backs of his blue gauntlets, and he charged the man who’d hurt him.
As his fellow X-Men had gradually discovered, Logan was many men in one. An acerbic loner and a staunch friend. A dedicated adherent of the Japanese warrior code of honor called bushido and a pragmatic, ruthless covert operative with a rare aptitude for dirty tricks. A stoic philosopher and a brawling carouser. But behind all his other personae lurked one that scarcely seemed human at all. A savage beast which, when evoked by rage, would kill without hesitation.
The X-Men hadn’t seen as much of the beast in recent years. Logan had gotten better at suppressing it. But Scott was certain it had just broken out of its cage and meant to butcher the man who’d shot it.
He fired an optic blast at Logan just as Jean cried, “No!” both aloud and inside his mind, a split second too late to deter him. His wide, low-power beam took the short man in the side and knocked him sprawling. Only then did he see that Wolverine didn’t really have his claws out after all.
Logan scrambled up and now the blades, slightly curved and twelve inches long, did spring into view. Then the man with the shotgun worked the pump again. Wolverine whirled, leapt into the air, and took the guy down with a side thrust kick to the jaw.
The officer Cyclops had disarmed bent over, evidently snatching for a second gun strapped to his ankle. Scott slammed him unconscious with another blast.
Meanwhile, the cop Logan had knocked down was dazedly trying to point his automatic at the Canadian. Jean wrenched the gun from his hand with her telekinesis, then stunned him with a mental bolt.
The X-Men surveyed the battlefield. The three cops and the civilian with the shotgun were down, and everyone else had run away. Cyclops shook his head in annoyance. There was no other way—the outcome was inevitable from the moment the first cop decided to shoot first and ask questions never, so to speak—but Scott Summers didn’t like it when things got so out of control so quickly.
Logan glared at Scott. “What was the idea of zapping me?” he demanded.
“I’m sorry,” Cyclops said, and he truly was, contrite and appalled that he could make such an error in combat. It was a mistake that in other circumstances could have gotten his teammate killed. ‘ !I could have sworn I saw your claws come out. Maybe it was light reflecting off the rain. I thought I only had an instant to stop you from cutting the man who shot you.”
The bloody flesh of Logan’s arm squirmed and twitched as it repaired itself. A pellet, forced from the wound it had made, fell to the pavement with
a clink.
“Did you really think I’d go berserk in a nothing little scuffle like this?” the Canadian asked. “Against guys who didn’t have a chance against us? You’re losin’ it, One-Eye.” “Maybe so,” said Cyclops humbly. “At any rate—” Wolverine pivoted toward Jean, cutting him off, and a pang of anger lanced through Scott’s remorse. “The cops are all unconscious,” Logan said. “Can you wake one of ’em up?” “I think so,” said Jean. “I tried to go easy on the last one, so we’d have someone to question.”
“Then let’s get to it,” Logan said. “Odds are, one of the guys who ran away has already called 911.”
The second officer Jean had felled was a middle-aged man with a sandy mustache and a small white scar on his chin. She knelt beside him, touched his cheek, and stared into his face, administering, Scott knew, the telepathic equivalent of smelling salts.
The policeman’s gray eyes fluttered open. He stared up blankly for a moment, then gave a violent start as he remembered what had happened and realized who was peering down at him.
“At ease, bub,” said Wolverine. “If we wanted to hurt you, I wouldn't have pulled your butt out of the way of that shotgun blast, now would I? We just need some answers. You can start by explaining why you attacked us.”
The policeman blinked in surprise. It was plain that whatever questions he might have expected, that wasn’t one of them. “Well... you know,” he stammered.
“Pretend that we don’t,” said Jean. “Please.”
The cop shook his head in puzzlement. “If that’s what you want. You X-Men are going to try to tear down the city, right? To convince people to stop discriminating against mutants or some such thing. SAFE and the Army are supposed to handle the situation, but of course we were on the lookout for you too, and when we saw you come out of the rain, we figured we had to defend ourselves.”
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