Cannonball thundered forward in a straight shot, aiming for a collision course. But the mutate apparently had anticipated that. The target folded up, dropping abruptly to the earth. Cannonball roared past and slammed into the trunk of a tree.
The trunk groaned and fell on top of him. It took three bursts of energy to get clear.
“What?” Sam blurted. He began blasting even as he fell backward in surprise.
The shape was Amphibius. One of the smaller mutates in the employ of Sauron, he bounced impressively high when he struck Cannonball’s kinetic envelope. Sam, invulnerable as ever inside the energy zone, was harmed neither by the small axe the frog man wielded, nor by the impact as he hit the ground.
Had Sam failed to notice Amphibius’s leap, though, he might have acquired a canyon in his skull.
“Beast! Iceman!” Sam cried. He jumped to his feet, whirling in the direction that Amphibius had just bounded in retreat.
Hank and Bobby must have already heard the altercation, he.cause they crashed into the fern tangle within a fraction of a second.
“Well?” Hank asked.
Cannonball was astounded. Amphibius had already vanished completely. In two quick sentences, Sam blurted what had happened,
“Quit jiggling on your feet like that,” Hank commanded.
“I’m maintainin’ my blast envelope,” Sam explained.
“Yes, and the sizzle of it is too loud.”
Cannonball cut off his power, looking every direction to be sure he wasn’t ambushed again while vulnerable.
Minus the hiss and spit of Sam’s power, they could hear leaves flapping aside as a sizeable creature hurtled through the vegetation. The noises came from the ten o’clock position from the direction Hank was facing.
“Go high,” Hank ordered Sam. “We’ll take low,”
Nodding, Cannonball lit a fire under himself and vaulted above the treetops in a roar he hoped would paint a yellow stripe right down the middle of Amphibius’s speckled green
back. The swamp spread out below him. He scanned closely for some sign of the fugitive.
Nothing. No swaying trees branches. No wriggling grass. Amphibius was bounding somewhere near ground level, beneath two to three layers of jungle and swamp canopy. Sam gnashed his teeth. After circling three times, he gave up visual surveillance. He landed in the top of a palm tree, cutting off his power to reduce noise, and proceeded to listen.
Twigs broke in the woods on the other side of an abundant tangle of berry vines. Cannonball launched off his perch, blasting again.
He battered aside leaves and branches. Suddenly the mossy, fern-littered ground appeared. Just to his right was Amphibius, wide-eyed and squawking at the abrupt interception. Sam cut his speed, but couldn’t avoid slamming into the earth.
Amphibius struck him. It didn’t hurt, of course, but the mutate gained momentum from the impact. He sailed up and over a bank of thick fronds before Cannonball could turn around.
“Oh, no y’don’t!” Sam shouted. “I ain’t lettin’ you get away! ’ ’
The X-Man hopped over the obstacle. He came down in a knee-deep puddle, scaring a pair of crocodiles. Amphibius was hopping between the tree trunks beyond, just about to vanish from view once more.
Cannonball thundered forward in a straight shot, aiming for a collision course. But the mutate apparently had anticipated that. The target folded up, dropping abruptly to the earth. Cannonball roared past and slammed into the trunk of a tree.
The trunk groaned and fell on top of him. It took three bursts of energy to get clear.
Amphibius was nowhere to be seen. Cannonball tossed aside splinters and looked this way and that. A laugh trickled through the vegetation. From where?
Iceman cruised over the fronds on an ice ramp and came to a stop beside his teammate. “Which way?” he demanded.
“I dunno,” Sam replied. “I’m going up again to have a look. He was headed thataway.” He pointed in the direction Amphibius had seemed to be fleeing.
Bobby raced into the forest, flinging a few icicle darts ahead for good measure. Sam rocketed into the sky.
The canopies again interfered. Cannonball spotted the Beast leaping past the site of the recent altercation, and glimpsed Iceman streaking on ahead, but there were just too many leaves. He came to roost on a smooth wide branch, cut his-power, and keened his ears. He could hear nothing over the racket of the parrots and other birds fleeing from Bobby’s strange, frigid appearance.
A splash.
Cannonball thundered off, this time cutting under the uppermost canopy, frightening still more parrots as well as a troop of monkeys. He soon reached a deep channel of water that he hadn’t been able to spot from higher up. Crocs were thrashing about, as if they had taken down prey.
Worth a closer look, Sam decided. He cut his speed and ricocheted from tree trunk to tree trunk, gazing at the panorama of jaws and scaly bodies in the water.
It was not Amphibius. The crocs were subduing an anaconda. The huge snake was a meal that would feed a whole crocodilian family, and they weren’t about to let it escape. Sam's brows rose. Lord, that’s primeval—a sight to gawk at from beginning to end, if not for the urgency of his mission.
Iceman burst through the cycads on the bank and reined up, whistling at the reptilian battle splashing the front end of his ramp. “Well?” he asked Sam.
Sam shrugged. Then he frowned and looked at the water. The channel was one of many winding through the trees here. Muddy, interconnected, deeply shaded, a lot could hide in under the surface.
“I think Amphibius is swimmin’ away from us,” Sam said.
The Beast, huffing slightly, sprinted to the bank and joined Iceman on his chill perch. “Swimming, did you say? I was afraid of that. He’s custom designed for this landscape. He wouldn’t have dared attack us alone if he hadn’t had the ability to hit and run.”
“Are you saying we should give up chasing him?” Iceman asked.
' “Au contraire,” Hank replied. “He wouldn’t just be out here for no reason. There’s something in this vicinity he’s protecting. We’ll take up residence, look for signs of him, but also investigate whatever it is he doesn’t want us to discover. If we get close enough to it, he’ll come to us.”
Sam clenched his fingers together, as if he had them wrapped around a fat, slimy neck. He’d done enough waiting. Time to make life difficult for the bad guys.
Logan knelt down, studying the tracks in the soft clay of the jungle floor. This deep beneath the galleries of branches, the plants grew in scattered clumps, deprived of the light they needed to be profuse. The spoor was easy to follow.
It took an experienced tracker to read the confusion of toe marks, however. He identified the deep, large impressions of the pack leader, the nearly-as-large but more graceful marks of a dominant female, the shallow and smaller holes left by a juvenile with a limp. And more. Still eight of the beasts.
He had come across the trail shortly before the report by radio that Hank, Bobby, and the kid had encountered Amphibius and were trying to comer him. He would have called for Archangel to airlift him to the swamp to add to that effort, but he had decided he might find more fun and games nearby. After all, wolves shouldn’t be traipsing through deep jungle. They liked open terrain or forests like the taiga lands of the Great White North, which Logan had called home in what seemed like the distant past. Ka-Zar said some packs had even ventured out of the Savage Land entirely into the snow fields. The jungle lord had assisted UN environmentalists to barricade a ravine so that the animals wouldn’t find their way down to the penguin rookeries. Talk about banquets in tuxedoes.
,n ,No, wolves shouldn’t be here. Unless they were Lupo’s wolves, summoned to help in one poisonous scheme or another. Maybe the animals were guarding something. Either way, Wolverine longed to put a claw or two between them and their intention.
It raised his hackles that Lupo had escaped so quickly. Worse yet that Betts had been snared in the process.
He stood and jogged onward. The spoor led across through a thicket, down a slope to a small creek—burbling with the runoff of the storms Ororo had been quenching all morning— and up the much steeper bank on the other side.
Logan was just reaching the top of the incline when he heard a rush of movement in the viny, flowering plants to which he was clinging. A cascade of wolves rained down on him. More than eight. Twenty. Twenty-five, perhaps. He had no time to actually count.
He crashed spinefirst onto the cobblestones of the creek-bed. A groan tried to burst from his lips, but he swallowed it. His adamantium blades flashed, thudding into wolf ribs. The big male atop his chest yelped and jumped away.
Even as he slashed at the ones continuing to land on his upper body or belly, others sank teeth into whatever parts they could—his knees, his groin, his underarms. Some tried for his throat. His healing factor would deal with it in time, but it still hurt.
He kicked, winning enough clear space to roll to his feet. The wolves hounded him from all sides. Blood dotted their teeth, adding to their frenzy. His blood. They held back only when his claws were actually swiping or thrusting toward them.
“Twenty of you to one of me. I gotcha outnumbered,” Wolverine growled. He strode forward over the slick rock, carrying the battle to his furry opponents.
“Wrong!” shouted a voice. Abruptly Wolverine was tumbling heels over head into the deeper part of the stream, jawbone singing. If not for his unbreakable bones, he would be spitting out teeth.
The wolves leapt in- again, but not before Logan glimpsed the hulking, four-armed figure at the base of the creek bank.
“Howdy, Barbaras,” the X-Man taunted. “You hit me with one fist or four? Whatever it was, didn’t do the job.” He struggled for footing in the thigh-deep current, nearly overwhelmed by the onslaught of lupine weight, but grinning.
Barbarus shrugged. “I’ll try again. No rush.” He lifted both his right arms and snapped fingers.
The wolves backed away. They paced five to six feet away from Wolverine, snarling, their eyes full of bloodlust, barely held in check.
“You did that almost as good as Lupo. Didn’t know his critters would listen to you, too.”
“They don’t.” Wolverine looked up. On the bank stood Lupo, with Gaza towering beside him. ‘ ‘I ordered them back.
I was indulging Barbaras. He wanted you to take a moment to contemplate the depth of your predicament.” The wolfish mutate chuckled.
Wolverine just grinned back, a smile full of teeth but no mirth. “I got business to settle with you.”
“Strange. That was just what I was going to say to you. Ybu are welcome to try to do so, but I’ve already—how do you outsiders so cleverly put it?—‘paid my dues’ yesterday. To get to me today, you’ll have to go through all my animals and Gaza and Barbarus, too.”
As Lupo spoke, Gaza descended the bank in one mighty leap and strode forward to join Barbaras. The giant’s sightless eyes seemed to twinkle in amusement.
Logan wasn’t afraid. The only time he sweated it out anymore was when he was worried about someone else. Fear for his own safety had been burned out of him way back. But he had to admit the odds were lousy. Much as he liked to fight, he didn’t like to lose.
He raised his wrist to his mouth to call for help, hoping an EMP wouldn’t trash the signal.
His wrist was bare.
“Oh, no, no,” Lupo jeered. “We can’t have you calling your friends. We have a schedule to follow.”
As he spoke, a wolf climbed the bank, clutching something between its jaws. Lupo took it, patted the animal on the head, and held up Logan’s radio. “Another trinket for Brainchild’s collection. He does so love to study the unique contraptions you mutants devise."
Wolverine rushed forward. Lupo howled a command, and a barrage of wolves met the X-Man’s charge. He made it only as far as the shallows before he was knocked over.
Two members of the pack shifted aside, letting Gaza insert himself into the melee. The mutate hammered Wolverine Stunned by the impact, Logan barely managed to swing his claws. Gaza avoided the razor edges with ease, able to sense their approach better than someone with sight.
A wave of dizziness pulsed through Logan’s head. He hurt in a hundred places. His healing factor strained to cope with • the endless series of wolf bites.
Bam! Gaza’s fist came in again. Logan had been too dazed to notice it; he hadn’t rolled with the punch at all.
The day had started off poorly. It had only gotten worse. Yesterday his hunches were right on the mark. But now the law of averages had come calling.
Law of the jungle. Either you go for the kill, or someone does the same to you.
Another blow above his ear. Now one to his solar plexus. With a wolf clomped onto both wrists, he could no longer summon the strength to raise his hands.
His knees buckled. Everything was hazy.
Through the fog, one huge blurry image was replaced by another, slightly smaller one with four arms. “My turn again,” said Barbaras gleefully. He swung. And swung and swung.
Unconciousness was a mercy.
Bright, sourceless light blazed down on his eyelids, which were almost too swollen to open, but Logan did so anyway.
He was being carried on a pole. He was trussed so tightly he couldn’t wiggle a finger. His hands had been carefully positioned so that even if he extended his claws, he would only be able to poke empty air.
The treetops closed in again, shadowing them. His carriers—Gaza and Barbaras—hung him between two saplings about eight feet off the ground, denying him even such small comfort as lying in the mud.
“Awake already?” Lupo leaned over him, grinning in his lupine way. “Your healing factor is truly impressive, I must say. I’ve heard that you had some trouble with it in the past. Pity you can’t do something about your age as well. You’re getting to be a pushover, old man.”
‘ ‘Stuff it,’ ’ Logan said. His lips were so puffy and bloodied that it sounded like, “Stpppft.”
Lupo grinned at the defiance and picked his teeth with a long, semihuman fingernail. “Good. So full of spunk. You’ll have lots of vital lifeforce to offer the master when he arrives.” The mutate tilted his head to look up at the sky. Logan saw now that they had just crossed a clearing formed by a giant fallen tree. The tree was specked with pteranodon guano. From the smell of the traces, the flying reptiles had landed here mere hours ago.
“He should be here soon,” Lupo continued. “My wolves have relayed the message that we have you. He’d be here already if he didn’t have to avoid being seen by that pesky Archangel.”
Logan no longer wondered when or how Sauron was going to make his big move. The freak had already begun.
The question was, what the hell was he, Logan, going to do about it?
He writhed inside his bonds, but it only made the lashings cut into his skin—his costume had been removed—and even if he did manage to dislodge the poles, he would only flop to the ground amid a pack of wolves that even now were licking their lips and whining for the opportunity to sample more of his blood.
“Now don’t get upset,” Lupo said. “Soon you’ll be feeling much, much more relaxed. Tomorrow moming you’ll awaken surrounded by friends. We have such plans for you and all the other X-Men.”
Storm lay supine in a hammock, her head supported by what was surely the most unique pillow she had ever sampled—an obloid of snakeskin filled with goose feathers. The hammock was strung over the platform where Shanna had earlier rinsed her off, providing her with a roofless, unobstructed view of the clouds.
S
he could barely raise her hands to rub her forehead, much less rise from her bower. Her bones felt as heavy as those ' of a brontosaurus, her muscles as weak as a snail’s.
But the sky was radiant, the breeze steady and controlled. The coming of night would probably bring more lightning. Frost might nip the highest hills. No matter. Those sorts of disturbances would play themselves out. She was at last free to turn her attention back to the reason why she had come to the Savage Land.
Shanna and Ka-Zar joined her on the platform. Zabu hopped up and nuzzled Ororo’s fingers, rumbling a note of concern.
“Still no word from Wolverine,” Shanna said.
Ororo lifted away from her pillow. The earth seemed to hang on to her. She set her head back down and hoped her temples would stop throbbing. “Hand me my radio, if you would,” she requested.
Shanna gave her the device, which Ororo had removed while she concentrated on the climate healing.
“Better hurry,” Ka-Zar said. “There’s always a long EMP
x-w
at dusk. It’s due any time now.” He gestured at the lavender and orange tones along the horizon—interestingly, the hues were rising in all directions, since the Savage Land’s “sunlight” stemmed from many sources, some having little connection to Earth’s actual sun.
Ororo nodded, and entered the code to transmit. “Beast? Do you copy?”
“You sound a little faint, my dear.” The reply was tinged with static, and was itself below normal strength.
“Faint is exactly how I feel,” Ororo said.
“How may I be of sendee, O leader mine?”
“Just a status check. Wolverine’s still missing. How are all of you out there?”
“Still chasing Amphibius. We keep coming across his trail. I’d like to recommend that Iceman, Cannonball, and I remain until dark. We can keep up the effort until the last moment.”
Ororo tried to think of objections, but she found it difficult to put two coherent ideas together. She saw silver wings growing closer, heralding Warren’s return. “Very well. Archangel is returning now, emptyhanded, which means Wolverine missed their rendezvous. We’ll focus on that problem. You remain and try to track Amphibius.”
Law of the Jungle Page 11