The cabin was full of noise. Amanda chanted in what Piotr assumed to be Latin. Kitty cried, “I don’t know how much longer I can hold her!” The transport groaned and shrieked. The monster’s flesh thudded and squelched as Colossus, Dracula, and Nightcrawler assailed it. Then Piotr tore a hole in the squirming clot of tentacles, and, with a muffled bang and a burst of smoke and brimstone, Nightcrawler vanished.
Colossus seized one fistful of dark, writhing limbs after another, ripping and ripping, trying to clear his own path to the outside. Beside him, Dracula, currently in the form of a canine as huge as a prehistoric dire wolf, rent the monster’s arms with his gnashing jaws. The demon’s glowing amber ichor streaked his muzzle.
At last the tentacles paused in their attack. Piotr tore away yet another knot of them, and then the way was clear. Before it could close again, he lunged forward, squirmed through, gripped some of the limbs encircling the exterior of the Runner and started to scale them as if they were a tangle of sturdy vines.
The howling slipstream battered him, doing its best to pry him loose from his perch. In his metallic form, he felt no discomfort, nor was the wind's strength any match for his own. Still, though more agile than most people would expect of such a large man, he was no acrobat like Kurt. One fumble and the relentless current of air might well dislodge him before he managed to catch himself. So he endeavored to climb carefully, the way Kurt had taught him, testing his holds.
Unfortunately, the monster had no intention of sitting idle while he concentrated on his ascent to the top of the plane. Tentacles pounded him, yanked at him, and he fended them off as best he could. Until suddenly the thickest one he’d seen yet rammed itself between his midsection and the plane, coiled around his waist, and attempted to pull him backward.
Piotr knew that as soon as die big arm dragged him loose, it would fling him into space. He clung to his handholds with all his might, then saw the stress of the tug-of-war begin to snap the thinner tendrils of flesh in two. He hoped that the damage would dissuade Belasco’s creature from its efforts, but it didn’t. Evidently the monster was willing to maim itself to be rid of an adversary.
The last of Colossus’s moorings started to shred, and then, to his surprise, the huge tentacle released him and lashed madly about. Looking around, Piotr saw Dracula in his black, half-human, half-bat form, clinging to the limb, savaging it with his talons and fangs, ripping away chunks of flesh. Other tentacles snaked toward the vampire, but they were too slow to rescue the larger arm. In another moment he shredded it in two.
The stump heaved, tossing Dracula off. In bat form or not, the undead creature would never be able to fly fast enough to catch up with the plane. Piotr threw out his arm and grabbed the edge of one of Dracula’s furry, membranous wings. His remaining handhold gave a sickening jerk as it took the extra weight, but the demon’s limbs remained in one piece while he pulled his ally back up against the flank of the plane.
The mutant and the vampire climbed on, battling tentacles every inch of the way.
Shadowcat studied the array of red lights on the instrument panel before her. If there hadn’t been lives at stake, her situation would almost be funny.
1 know there’s a huge, heavy monster blocking your view and ripping the plane apart, Kitty, and just to make life even more interesting, the weather’s the absolute pits, but you can fly the Runner a few more miles, can’t you? Oh, and please keep the ride soft and steady. Because some of us are going to be hanging on the outside of the plane, and you mustn’t bounce us off.
Sure, fuzzy elf, no problemo.
Yeah, right.
Amanda abruptly broke off her spellcasting to spit out something that Kitty suspected might be a Romany swear word. Twisting in her seat, the younger woman saw more tentacles writhing and snaking through the hatch. And without Petey, Kurt, and Dracula to block the way, there was nothing to stop them from slithering their way all the way up the cabin and into the cockpit.
Or rather, nothing but Amanda. Taking up a position halfway up the plane, clutching at a seat for balance with one dainty, crimson-gloved hand and gesturing with the other, the lovely blonde sorceress resumed her magic. First she conjured a round, floating shield of golden force, then hurled sizzling bolts of power. The mystical attacks seared the ends of the monster’s tentacles, while the barrier danced back and forth, blocking the limbs that struck at her.
Kitty was somewhat relieved that the Gypsy was better able to affect the individual tentacles than the monster as a whole.
But there were so many of them, streaking at her friend in a relentless onslaught! “Can you hold them?” the mutant yelled.
“Yes!” An especially large tentacle slammed into the shield, bashing it backward. Amanda likewise fell back a step, giving up ground.
Kitty turned back to her instruments and controls, then did her best not to think about what might be happening just a few feet behind her. Or about the fact that the Runner was presently about as aerodynamic as a grand piano. She’d trust her teammate to defend her back, focus calmly on the task before her as Wolverine and her other senseis had taught her, and fly.
Because of the tentacles, Kurt had half-consciously expected the demon to resemble a colossal octopus or jellyfish, and to some extent, it did. But when he turned, he saw that the creature’s body, currently squatting midway between the Runner's tail and nose, was a dark humanoid head ten feet high, with lean, chiseled features, blank, lambent yellow eyes, and pointed ears. A huge copy of his own features, in fact.
Lightning flared, illuminating the head and revealing its expression. It wore the perverse, sadistic smirk that Kurt had only seen on the features of that other Nightcrawler whom Belasco had broken to his will, and thereafter in a nightmare or two.
Startled and repulsed, the mutant simply gaped at the monster for a moment, until he noticed the stealthy glide of a thin tentacle across his throat. The loop bit suddenly tight like a garrote, but he teleported out of it before it could cut off his wind or slice into his flesh.
This time he managed a clean landing, reappearing immediately in front of the mammoth head. In the split second he needed to anchor himself, it flowed from a copy of his own features to one of Amanda’s, her wide-eyed face a mask of panic and despair. He drove the saber into it. Amber ichor spurted, and the slipstream flung it away.
Tentacles reared about him, flailing and grasping. As he fought, he teleported repeatedly to elude them, always aware of just how easy it would be to bungle a shift and slip from the spine of the reeling plane, Meanwhile, the head, now mottled with the yellow stabs and gashes he’d inflicted on it, oozed from Amanda’s countenance to Piotr’s, his ordinarily pleasant features twisted into an ugly scowl of rage.
Before long, the strain of making so many jumps in rapid succession began to take its toll. Nightcrawler moved to deflect a tentacle with the guard of his saber, but the arm whipped under his guard and, before he could execute a second parry, clipped him on the temple. His vision blurred with the jab of pain, and other limbs battered and clutched him.
Then Colossus and Dracula clambered onto the top of the plane.
If the Russian even noticed that the monster had reproduced his own face, the discovery didn’t seem to faze him. More or less crawling to make sure he didn’t take a fall, Piotr dragged himself to the base of the gargantuan head, grabbed its jowl with one hand, and punched it with the other. His steel fist plunged into the monster’s flesh as easily as had Kurt’s blade.
Dracula, a snarling gargoyle with long, pointed ears and enormous wings, tightly folded at the moment to keep them from catching the wind, raked the head’s other profile with his claws. A heavy tentacle whirled at the back of his own misshapen skull, and, somehow sensing the blow, he ducked beneath it.
The limbs attacking Kurt faltered for the instant he needed to pull himself together and teleport. With Piotr and Dracula now fighting there, there was no room for anyone else to attack the giant head from the front, so he jumped on
top of it, noting that, though it currently looked like steel, it still felt like rubbery flesh. Perched on that new vantage point, he noticed the lights of a city beneath the Runner, and, a bit farther ahead, a broad, black expanse that must be the Mississippi River.
For the next half minute, he cut at the monster furiously, trying to strike at its eyes. Meanwhile, his allies assailed the creature just as savagely. But no matter how many shining yellow wounds they inflicted, the creature’s tentacles bashed and clutched at them relentlessly, until, gasping, he began to wonder if it was even possible to kill it.
The monstrous head flowed into a facsimile of Dracula’s aquiline, arrogant human countenance. Deep puncture wounds, many of them the product of his own fist, marred the portrait, but as far as Colossus could tell, they hadn’t even slowed the demon down.
Time for another approach, then, repugnant though it would be. He grabbed the lip of the one of the punctures and yanked downward, turning the hole into a long gash. Then he started to squirm his way inside it.
Wet, reeking flesh, a blackness streaked with amber phosphorescence, enfolded his upper body, effectively blinding him. It might have suffocated him as well, except that in his armored form, he did not breathe. But the acrid stench of its fluids was almost unbearably foul.
He felt tentacles looping about his legs, and kicked madly to dislodge them before they could drag him back out. Clutching at the monster’s substance, he dragged himself entirely inside it, then struggled to his knees.
The demon’s tissues clenched around him like a fist, a terrible peristalsis that threatened to immobilize him and might in time even pulverize his armored body. He retaliated by tearing at the monster furiously. If the creature had vital organs, his rending hands would encounter them sooner or later. If not, then he’d simply continue until he demolished the entire mass.
Eventually, after what seemed an eternity spent sightless and constricted in this reeking, claustrophobic cavity, his fingers raked through a lobed node of flesh softer than the dense, rubbery meat surrounding it. Then the demon’s body suddenly melted into slime. He grinned, but his satisfaction was shortlived. With nothing solid anchoring him in place, he lost his balance, slid on the layer of jelly beneath him, and tumbled off the plane.
When the monster dissolved into glop, Kurt abruptly had nothing to cling to. Hanging in midair, he started to teleport back onto the Midnight Runner’s spine, then perceived just in time that the nose was dropping while the plane as a whole was spinning on its axis. The wing whirled around at him like an immense black fly swatter.
With the transport spinning, it would he impossible to jump back aboard, even if there was any point to it. He frantically shifted himself across the sky, out of harm’s way, then looked on helplessly as the jet hurtled on and vanished in the darkness. Praying that his companions too would get off safely, Kurt pulled his ripcord.
The stink of ichor and scorched demon flesh burned in Kitty’s nose and throat, all but choking her. “Just so you know,” Amanda panted, “I’m about six feet behind you. The tentacles keep pushing me back.”
“Got it,” the younger woman said, keeping her eyes locked on her instruments. The monster’s limbs rustled on the floor, whizzed through the air. Amanda shouted a magic word, and her mystical bolts crackled, the flashes illuminating the interior of the plane.
Then came a splashing, squelching sound, and the layer of limbs obscuring the window in front of Kitty dissolved into fluid, which instantly began to stream away.
Kurt, Piotr, and Dracula must have succeeded in killing the demon. What’s more, she could now see Natchez beneath her, and the Mississippi, dead ahead. By some miracle, she’d piloted the Runner where it needed to go.
Tortured metal shrieked. The plane dropped, spun, and with a final flicker of red warning lights, the controls went dead. She heard a thump and a slosh: Amanda falling and melted monster flesh slopping around.
She twisted in her seat to make sure the sorceress was all right. She was, bouncing around inside the rotating cabin like laundry tumbling in a dryer, but conscious and unharmed. “Get to the ground!” Kitty cried.
“Right!” Amanda said, then disappeared.
Shadowcat phased, then, waiting until the Runner was upright, rose from her chair, passing effortlessly through the straps of her safety harness and standing not on the floor but on the air itself. The plane hurtled on, its substance penetrating hers as harmlessly and painlessly as the belts had, leaving her behind in an instant. It raced on toward the surface of the river, flying to pieces in the moment before it hit.
Kitty peered about the rain-swept sky. Presumably Petey, Kurt, and Dracula had all survived the fight with the monster, then jumped clear as the Runner began its final dive. Having plummeted in free fall. Colossus would already be on the ground by now, but perhaps she could spot Nightcrawler dangling from his parachute, or the vampire flapping around on his leathery wings. Yet even when the lightning strobed, she found herself standing alone in the void beneath the storm clouds and the earth.
Which might well mean that the team had been thoroughly scattered, and there was no telling how much precious time it would take them all to find one another again.
Unaffected by the frigid wind and the downpour, she ran toward the ground as if she were jogging down an invisible ramp.
Chapter 10
Shivering, the woman who now remembered that her name was Ororo peered longingly through the window of a Circle K convenience store. Though the establishment was closed and dark, like nearly all of the businesses she’d passed in the course of her wandering, she might be able to break in, steal some food, and, assuming no alarm went off, take shelter until morning. Enemies or not, she didn’t want to continue aimlessly prowling the streets. She was weary and chilled to the bone, and her hunger was a fierce, cramping ache in her belly.
In the hours since she’d dragged herself from the spillway, her memory had continued to return in bits and pieces. She knew her name. She could see the loving faces of her parents, and recall the nightmare moment when the bomb exploded, killing them and leaving her buried in rubble beside her mother’s corpse. After her escape she’d eked out a miserable existence in the back alleys of Cairo, friendless and often as cold and famished as she was right now, until the master thief Achmed el-Gibar took her in and taught her to steal. Still later, prompted by an unfathomable yet irresistible instinct, she’d trekked south to the Serengeti, her mother’s native land, where she’d discovered her ability to control the weather. She used it to aid the local tribes, and in consequence they came to worship her as a deity.
So much was clear. But she was still unsure of the full extent of her powers or of precisely how to wield them, just as she had no idea of why or when she’d left Africa for America.
Please, Goddess, she silently prayed, heal me. Restore me to myself.
Down the street and to her right, three figures emerged from the hissing rain. Two of them had rifles in their hands.
Perhaps, Ororo thought, the gunmen were nothing to do with her. Even if they were her enemies, it was entirely possible that they had yet to spot her in the gloom and the downpour. Intending to hide, she skulked toward the corner of the convenience store as Achmed had taught her, whacking her with his rattan cane when she failed to move stealthily enough to suit him.
The two riflemen shouldered their weapons. The guns flashed, banged, and Ororo threw herself sideways. Twin holes appeared in the windows. If she hadn’t dodged, at least one of the bullets would have caught her in the chest.
So much for the optimistic notion that the men meant her no harm, or that they had yet to notice her, for that matter. She sprinted for all she was worth, while the rifles banged, and glass cracked and shattered just behind her.
When she rounded the corner of the Circle K, she nearly ran headlong into two more men who were trotting the other way. The larger of the two, a pudgy man in a gleaming black slicker, had a sawed-off shotgun in his hand. The other
, leaner and younger, his head shaved, carried a sledgehammer. He wore a white T-shirt that the storm had rendered transparent and glued to his torso, which bore the letters foh.
The initials meant something to her, something abhorrent, but she had no time to try to tease it from her memory. At her sudden appearance, the fat man flinched backward, but his companion bellowed, raised the sledgehammer over his head, and charged.
Acting on instinct, she pointed her hand at him, and a gust of wind, powerful as a tornado, sprang up out of nowhere. The skinhead reeled backward, a crust of frost forming on the front of his body.
From the corner of her eye, Ororo glimpsed the other man pointing the shotgun at her. She pivoted, willing the freezing wind to batter him as well, but instead of shifting as she intended, it simply died.
She dropped low as someone—she could suddenly picture him too, a short, muscular man with bristling black hair and bushy side whiskers—had taught her. The gun boomed, and the blast streaked over her head. At the same instant, she swept out her right leg, snagged her attacker’s ankle, and jerked him off his feet.
As he fell, he cracked his head against the white-painted cinderblock wall of the store, but the blow didn’t stop him from clumsily trying to aim his weapon at her again. She straightened up and kicked him in the jaw. Bone snapped, and he slumped back, seemingly unconscious.
Ororo spun toward the skinhead. He was on his knees, whimpering and shuddering, no longer a threat. But she knew her first three attackers must even now be charging up behind her. She raced on, her boots splashing up water, and headed down a side street lined with strip malls, tire stores, and fast food franchises. She prayed that she could lose her pursuers somewhere along it.
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