Law of the Jungle

by Unknown Author

  They were finally high enough to see around a bend in the stream channel. One of the steep banks ahead was split by a tall, dim opening.

  “A cave?” Sam whispered.

  “ ’Twould appear so,” Hank answered in like tones. He tried to imagine how the spot would appear from above, and decided the topography was sufficient to make the gash appear to be nothing more than a shadow. It could only be seen from within the ravine, and only when quite near, as they were now. Given such natural camouflage, it was little wonder it had not been spotted during Storm or Archangel’s reconnaissance flights.

  The sound of voices filtered down the ravine. That and heavy footfalls gave away the arrival of a large number of men well before the party rounded a fan of scree and became visible. The newcomers trudged straight for the cave mouth.

  '' “We have the right place,” Hank said.

  At the head of the procession marched Gaza, tall, broadshouldered, and wearing an expression of proud command. A blind man, leading. Immediately behind him hopped Amphibius. Several burly warriors made up the central group. The largest two of them carried Bobby Drake on a pole suspended atop their shoulders. Vertigo hung close by, her eyes studying the unconscious captive intently— no doubt, Hank concluded, in order to daze him with her power should he demonstrate the slightest sign of awakening. After her came a few more Savage Land natives. Barbaras brought up the rear, positioned as the heavy muscle should they be pursued.

  Hank winced to see Bobby jostling along, limp, his uniform tom and at least one big welt rising on his temple—a truly nasty one to be visible from such a distance—and mud spatter everywhere.

  “We gotta help him,” Sam said, keeping his voice down, but imbuing his words with all the emotional force of a gut-teral yell.

  “No, Sam.”

  “But I have a clear shot. All five are out in the open, and not a one of them can stand up to me when I’m blastin’.”

  “That’s correct only if you succeed in hitting them, and if Vertigo doesn’t twist your cerebellum upside down inside your skull.”

  “Thanks for the vote o’ confidence, old man.”

  The Beast clutched Cannonball by the chin and forced him to stare directly back. “Samuel Guthrie, this is not about your competence. Ordinarily I would be pushing you into the fray, and don’t think it’s easy for me holding still this way. But we can’t tip our hand until we’re ready to finish the job. If we attack now, maybe we’d get Bobby back, but we would lose the element of surprise as far as our other comrades are concerned.”

  Hank knew he wasn’t saying anything Sam didn’t already know, but it had to be said, merely in order to make the advice real enough to obey himself.

  Sam sighed and nodded.

  Hank let go and turned back to the raiding party, wishing in a way that his junior colleague had kept arguing and somehow convinced him to be impulsive. Hank’s toes dug into the sand at the bottom of the fissure. He tested the springiness of his foot muscles, wanting so much to leap out of concealment and come thundering down at their enemies like the Juggernaut with a wasp under his helmet.

  Before Gaza reached the cave mouth, two muscular guards stepped out of the shadows and lifted their chest axes in welcome. The mutate saluted briefly. The sentinels ducked hastily out of the way of his towering frame. Gaza proceeded inside the arch of native limestone and bat guano, an opening so generous he did not have to stoop. The other mutates and tribesmen poured after him.

  Iceman vanished with them. Hank simultaneously felt the pang of lost opportunity, and relief that he no longer had to watch his dear old friend swaying from side to side like a shot and gutted three-point buck.

  The guards stepped back into the gloom of the overhang, but spying carefully, Hank could make out the foot and sandal of one of them, confirming that they had been, and were, watching the vicinity for arrivals, friendly or hostile.

  They were lax, Hank noted. Probably feeling like they’ve won. The mutates had looked less smug. Their brood had fought the X-Men several times and had probably been considerably less than enthused to realize their major offensive had failed to corral two of their targets. Were the sentries remaining alert enough to worry about? Did they have compatriots hidden in the shrubs and scree?

  Hank carefully evaluated the landscape for hidden lookouts, but the only movement that caught his eye was grass swaying in the breeze, birds floating by, and the drifting of leaves and sticks along the channels of the brook. He smelled no warning aromas.

  The guards probably had orders not to wander beyond the cave mouth, out of concern their movements would betray the existence of the very hiding place at which they were stationed. Well, that was something, at least—if Hank and Sam couldn’t get in unobserved, at least they could operate in relative freedom while outside.

  The large group of raiders had been gone only two or three minutes when Zabu stirred and clambered down the slope again.

  Cannonball frowned. “You don’t think he—”

  “Yes, 1 do,” the Beast replied. “He’s going in after them. We have to stop him.”

  They hurried from rock to rock, finally catching up as the sabretooth reached the trail and turned to continue up the ravine.

  Hank placed himself in the way.

  Zabu grumbled. Not loudly enough to alert Sauron’s guards, but rich with a threatening, get out of my way tone. He raised a paw, showing his huge, curved, keenly tapered nails.

  “We want to help Ka-Zar,” Hank said in a calm, friendly voice. “Help Ka-Zar, yes?”

  Zabu put down his paw and gazed at the X-Man, blinking every few seconds and cocking his head at an angle. “Mnrr?” ’

  “Help Ka-Zar,” Hank repeated. “Go that way to help Ka-Zar.” He waved his hand back the way they had come.

  Zabu snorted lightly, lifted up on his hind legs, put his front paws on the Beast’s shoulders, and began striding toward the cave, forcing Hank to back up step by step in a bizarre imitation of a circus dance.

  “I think he don’t agree,” Sam murmured. “He’s got the veto power, Dr. McCoy, and he’s usin’ it.”

  “We could let him go ahead,” Hank conceded, “but he could help us more if we planned an attack.” He placed his face right up against the animal’s nose. “Go that way. Help Ka-Zar more. Pounce on Sauron.”

  Zabu dropped to all fours. “Rrrr?”

  “Trust me, kitty,” Hank said. “We’ll be back very soon. Pounce on Sauron. Pounce on Gaza. Pounce on Vertigo.” The cat turned. Growling discontentedly, he ambled downstream, in the lead as if going that way were his idea.

  Sam shook his head in amazement as he and Hank sashayed along a step behind the feline’s stubby tail. “I thought sure he was gonna carve you into little beast bits if you didn’t get out of his way.”

  Hank shrugged. “I could not have perservered had I indulged in such disheartening speculation. I filled my inner being with images of our venerable smilodon as I observed him night before last, licking young Matthew’s noggin and snuggling against him like a mother cat around her kitten. One uses what artifices one can to beguile one’s own fear reflex. That technique, I am gratified to say, worked unusually well.”

  “You soothed the savage beast?”

  Hank winced. “Oh, puh-lease don’t use that phrase.” “Sorry. It sorta slipped out.” Cannonball paused to watch a covey of chicken-sized compsognathuses as they burst from the concealment of the brush by the stream and raced across a bridge of dead branches to safety on the far bank. “So . .. now that we’re goin’ this way, do you mind telling me why we’re goin’ this way? You ain’t plannin’ to go get Tongah and the villagers to help? That would take an awful lot of time.” _

  Hank spared a moment to admire the way the compsog-nathus’s heads swivelled so adroitly on their necks. Their name meant elegant jaw. They deserved it. “Don’t fret, my brave Samuel. Extended delay is the last quality I care to introduce to our strategy. We’re going back to the meadows we saw earlier. If all goes
well, we’ll be hurrying back much better equipped to cope with our enemies’ superior numbers than if you and I and Zabu rushed in right now.”

  “How’ll we manage that?”

  Hank leaned close. His tone was boisterous. “I have a cunning plan.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The psychic corona flared so hotly Psylocke shut her eyes and turned away. No good. The image still burned, thrusting right through her skull and bombarding the nexus of her telepathic senses. At the center of the burst hung Iceman, his head trapped between Sauron’s palms, giving up life energy from every chakra of his body. Bobby’s mouth was flung wide in a scream, but no sound was emerging—he had no air left in his lungs to propel through his vocal cords. ✓

  She had seen lifeforce caught in such violent outpourings many times. Usually as part of the process of death. That’s what being touched by Sauron felt like—death. Except that the victim had no guarantee of release from suffering. Upon awakening, he or she might be harvested all over again.

  Too much. Betsy made it a point not to cry for herself, but her resolve wasn’t as unassailable in regard to the agony of comrades. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Poor Bobby. Brought in like a rag doll, fitted with the collar, trussed up, and before he could even awaken, that fiend had come in waving his devil wings, grabbed hold of him, and started to ingest his essence like a spider from hell.

  Bobby was awake now. The pain had yanked him out of his merciful semicoma.

  Suddenly, the waves of anguish dissipated. She opened her eyes. Sauron had stepped back from Iceman’s slab, propelled by Gaza and Barbarus’s vise-grip tugging.

  “You dare interrupt,” screeched the monster.

  “I ordered them to pull you away,” Brainchild hurriedly explained from his perch by his monitoring equipment. “I had to. You are nearing the limit we spoke of. Save this X-Man for later, Master. You have no real need of his energies yet.”

  Sauron flung off his servitors’ hold. They backpedalled, flinching. He raised a wing to bat at them both, but refrained from following through. Instead, he stalked to Brainchild, whose knees began trembling.

  “I do not care for underlings telling me what to do. Not even one so valuable as you, my melon-headed savant.” Sauron loomed over the little mutate until the latter nearly fell back off his stool.

  “For the sake of the ... adjustment, Master, do not draw any more power.” He spoke sotto voce, so that only his frightful lord would hear, but Psylocke “heard” him. By borrowing a little boost from each of her allies for the past several hours, her telepathy was consistently available, if feeble. Brainchild was so entangled in apprehension that he was not only psychically broadcasting everything he wanted to conceal, but doing so in such a way that he was unaware of her eavesdropping.

  An adjustment, eh? Psylocke gazed carefully at Sauron. With the final boost of lifeforce, he no longer exuded the orderly, sedate mental flows she had witnessed earlier in her captivity. His aura was popping with spikes of crimson anger, swirling with brown tornadoes of confusion, and more than anything, glittering with the prismatic sheen of the two personalities within.

  No. Wait.

  Betsy’s almond eyes opened wide. Not two layers. Three. The creature possessed an additional personality beyond that of Karl Lykos and Sauron. This third identity blanketed the other two the way the Angel of Death persona had once overlaid Warren’s true self, back when Apocalypse had wrought his evil handiwork.

  She understood fully now why this new Sauron had not moved against the X-Men until she, Psylocke, had been neutralized. Had she been able to get close and scan him before her powers had been drained, she would have understood immediately what had allowed him to stifle the insanity of his other selves and take up a fresh campaign of conquest.

  Brainchild’s anxiety was well-placed. The latest infusion of power had altered the balance within Sauron. The third, overlaid psyche had already siphoned as much energy as it could use; much of Iceman’s strength had gone not to it, but to the dormant personas. Somewhere deep down, Karl Lykos was stirring. In the shallows, the other, manic Sauron was contaminating the calm, transcendent version that had outfought the X-Men so thoroughly these past few days.

  Brainchild tapped instructions into the console in front of him. A hum emerged from a series of prongs that jutted from the ceiling, near the light fixtures. Psylocke had wondered what the devices might be; Brainchild had outfitted the chamber with so many odd accouterments that the place hardly seemed a part of the Savage Land at all, except for the natural subterranean walls and the animal-skin attire of the guards.

  Sauron closed his eyes, shook his long, narrow head, and drew in a deep breath. The psychic gale around him calmed to a fitful, weakened storm. To her surprise, Psylocke began to feel soothed as well. The prongs were emitting some sort of whisper. Not the sort of thing'one could hear with one’s ears, but compelling to someone who possessed the mind of a psi. The murmur reminded Betsy of the white noise of a waterfall, nature’s own sedative. Many was the time she had fallen asleep as a child to the lullaby of the fountain outside her bedroom window back in England.

  “Very well,” Sauron said. “I won’t have to execute you for insolence just yet.”

  Brainchild gulped.

  Gaza’s deep voice rumbled. “You understand, do you not? We don’t want you to revert to what you were when we found you this past season.”

  Sauron gazed at the titan with his baleful orbs. Gaza almost tripped over Amphibius while backing away.

  “You think I have forgotten?” Sauron murmured.

  “No, Master,” Gaza said quickly. “I did not mean that at all.” '

  “ Ah,” Sauron said, this time with a hint of diplomacy and forgiveness. “You were concerned for me. I see. Sometimes I forget the debt I owe you all.”

  Gaza visibly relaxed. The other mutates released pent-up breaths.

  “Do not worry, my faithful brood,” the villain said. “I have not forgotten.”

  Abruptly Psylocke was inundated by powerful impressions. They poured from Sauron as if he had momentarily lost control of his hypnotic ability to project thoughts. Betsy had been sucked into telepathic contact with him without intending it. Hurriedly she severed the feedback loop that would have alerted him to her conscious monitoring. Then she exited his mind. Though she wanted to probe him, this was not the time or the way. Had she not fled, he would have become aware of her within moments despite her precautions. She had to wait until the advantage was hers.

  In the instant of contact, she received and memorized recollections so vivid she would sooner forget incidents from her own life. There were two scenes that stood out above all others. In the first, Karl Lykos, still a young man—and still human save for his vampiric hunger—lurked in an alley in Brooklyn. He waited until a derelict, besotted by wine, staggered through the trash heaps and flopped down on the grate of a heating vent to sleep. Lykos drained the unshaven, soursmelling individual of energy, assuaging his addiction, but reinforcing his self-contempt.

  In the other image, a pteranodon-man wandered aimlessly across the Savage Land, barely aware of his surroundings and completely unsure of his own identity. He skirmished with wild pterosaurs during attempts to scrounge food from them. He was harassed by velociraptors, lions, jackals. He sat exposed in the frequent, monsoonlike downpours, all because he had forgotten how to take shelter from inclement weather. He was tortured by fragmentary reveries of battles fought or of a blonde, vibrant lady that he had loved with all his heart. What he endured was not life; it was merely existence.

  The Sauron currently sharing the cavern with Psylocke abhorred the prospect of reverting. Even more than the shame of taking up life as guilt-ridden Karl Lykos, he feared a fate like that of the drunk in the Brooklyn gutter—-a victim, useless to anyone including himself. That’s all he had been. A homeless automaton. The Savage Land’s own version of an enfeebled psychotic who had forgotten to take his medication and could no longer recall his address. />
  Sauron closed his eyes, sighed, and when he opened them, he was smiling grimly, like a soldier after a firelight, who has checked himself carefully and discovered that none of the blood on his fatigues is his own, and that he truly has survived.

  Betsy gritted her teeth in annoyance. The crisis had passed.

  Had she possessed her powers, she was certain she could have pushed him over the edge somehow. The third personality lacked the spectral anchors typical of organic astral selves. It was artificial—truly just an overlay. Brainchild had somehow managed to make it dominant, but that did not mean it was securely attached, nor as durable as the others.

  She recalled the probe she had made of Lupo’s mind. Amid those glimpses she had seen Brainchild studying books and texts on computer screens that Magneto had provided. One of the book titles finally came into focus: The Three Faces of Eve. The tale of the very first diagnosed case of what became known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Psylocke had read it more than once. Not only was it a seminal account of that odd, rare condition, but it spoke to the nature of, minds in ways telepaths needed to comprehend in order to gain proper mastery over their power. Charles Xavier had a first edition in his library. He valued it so much he had gone to the trouble of reacquiring the book when Sinister’s destruction of the mansion had torched the copy he had owned prior.

  Eve suffered from a Jekyll/Hyde existence, spending part of her waking hours as a meek housewife, and part as a licentious, irresponsible barfly. Her therapist had molded a third personality possessed of the moral high standards of the first, with the willpower and imagination of the second. The fusion worked, not only curing the patient, but making her happier and better adjusted than she had ever been. Dr. Leonard Samson had recently performed a similar fusion with Bruce Banner, aka the incredible Hulk—perhaps the most famous sufferer of MPD.

  Brainchild had taken it upon himself to serve as Sauron’s therapist, setting into motion a treatment program that mimicked what psychiatrists such as Samson had been doing for a generation. The mutate was recalling that herculean effort at that very moment, allowing Psylocke to telepathically sift the story out of him. Sauron had not been a cooperative or typical subject. The “melon-headed savant,” as his master had called him, had been unable to make real progress until he had rebuilt and modified Magneto’s telepathic teaching devices and created an artificial prime self for Sauron via technological manipulation. The new Sauron was not a true identity at all; he was the old Sauron, playing an assigned role, with a script running constantly at the verge of awareness. Like a method actor who has rehearsed his lines a thousand times, Sauron said the right things and did the right things and, because he believed them to be functions of his own choice, he provided the will and leadership that the brood required.