X-Men: The Last Stand (33 page)

They probably climbed a hundred feet without pause, moving at a rapid, relentless clip, before they reached a bend in the road that seemed to be a safe vantage spot.

When the guide’s vision cleared, as he tried to stammer thanks to men who’d hear none of it, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d been felled by a titanic wave caused when the entire north tower of the bridge moved past them and into the bay, as though pivoting on some monumental axis.

In the distance, he saw what seemed to him like minor puffs of smoke from the San Francisco base of the bridge. Close-up, he knew, for those in the Presidio with a grandstand seat—as he and his tourists had over here—there’d be nothing “minor” about it at all. Whatever had wrenched the bridge from its Marin moorings was doing the same across the Golden Gate.

Something flicked across his peripheral vision and he caught sight of a TV news helicopter buzzing the scene, taking advantage of what little light remained to broadcast the event live.

But even as the helicopter approached, it twisted into sudden and unexpected evasive action as one impossible event was eclipsed by another. Freed of all its anchors, from both shores and the foundations of the towers, the Golden Gate Bridge rose silently and majestically into the air, to proceed in stately procession deeper into the bay, leaving in its wake a trail of tumbling cars and collapsing superstructure from either end, like Hansel and Gretel depositing breadcrumbs so they might find their way home.

Magneto placed one foot on the coaming of the bridge walkway and leaned forward on bent knee, surveying the way ahead with cool confidence and no small amount of pride, like a shipmaster bringing his vessel into harbor.

“Charles always wanted to build bridges,” he commented.

And Jean thought,
It’s always about Charles. Every action, every decision, you measure against him, as though you can’t accept the rightness of your cause until you prove him wrong.

As though sensing the tenor of her thoughts, he turned to face her, indicating their fast-approaching destination—the former prison island of Alcatraz.

“Once that cure is gone, nothing can hold you back.
Nothing.
”

And Jean thought,
Silly, foolish man, you talk as if that’s a
good
thing.

She couldn’t deny, though, how much she was tempted, and she knew the intoxication of the moment, the anticipation of what was to follow, showed in her eyes, on her face.

Aloud, with a smile he should have found dangerous, she said, “I know.”

She closed her eyes, released her power, took a count of the souls on the bridge, and those awaiting them on the island. If Magneto asked for their disposition, she’d tell him. Otherwise, she decided to hold her peace.

She wondered if she should tell him the X-Men had arrived.

Everyone crowded the flight deck for a view of the bridge as Ororo brought the
Blackbird
over the bay in a wide, sweeping turn that allowed them all to see what was happening. Further aft, at Hank’s tech station, every screen on the main display revealed a variation of the same event, pulled from all the local TV channels, plus the national and international news networks. Far more than the incidents at the Worthington clinics, this was something the whole world was indeed watching.

“Oh my stars and garters,” Hank murmured, taking refuge in a catchphrase he hadn’t used for years. It went with the costume.

Kitty, sitting in the right seat, announced in response to a flashing telltale on her panel, “We’re being painted, TraCon Doppler radar from Oakland and San Francisco International.” She tapped a control, refining the sweep. “But—I’m getting some Q-band activity, high range, reads as an E2C Hawkeye AWACS off the
Teddy Roosevelt,
establishing a target portrait for possible air strikes.”

Ororo tapped a code into the center control console, between her and Kitty. “Going to stealth mode.”

From outside, the great black aircraft, already difficult to see in the gathering darkness, shimmered and then vanished, both to the naked eye and to all forms of electronic detection.

“On your toes, people,” Ororo said quietly. “Everyone back to your places and strap in. Henry, Kitty,” she added, “we’re depending on you now. This airspace is likely to get more than a little bit crowded and since we can’t be seen, we can’t be evaded. It’s up to you two to keep us from any collisions.”

“A circumstance most devoutly to be avoided, ma’am,” Hank agreed with mock solemnity, while Kitty, in the midst of tossing him a slightly jaundiced look, simply nodded.

In its way, M-day, as this would come to be called when it was all over, proved as significant and memorable a start to the twenty-first century for the City by the Bay as its fabled earthquake had been for the twentieth. It was certainly the kind of thing that nobody present ever forgot, especially those “privileged” enough to actually watch it unfold firsthand.

It had been just a normal Friday afternoon, with everyone going about their average and altogether ordinary pursuits, closing out the workweek, preparing for the weekend. Most folks downtown weren’t even aware of anything amiss, at first; Magneto’s seizure of the bridge occurred so fast, and the action itself was so incredibly unbelievable, that even with a helicopter on the scene, broadcasting live, it still took a little bit of time for the word to spread, and for it to be taken seriously.

Imagine the moment, riding the cable car up and over the crest of Russian Hill, thinking about what to do for dinner, bills to pay, aching back, walking the dog, watching cable, gazing out at the familiar sight of Alcatraz—the mind perhaps not quite registering what the eyes behold, the sight of this magnificent feat of engineering, one of the marvels of human history, gliding effortlessly across the waves.

In that, appearances truly were deceiving, because for Magneto the traverse was proving anything but effortless.
Lifting
this mass of better than a half million tons was but the first challenge, and moving it was nothing compared to the necessity of keeping the entire structure together.

Jean watched impassively, gauging the strain he was placing on his body, impressed by his determination. This would have been no small feat for him in his prime, and yet Magneto had first manifested his power in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, better than sixty years before.

She shrugged inside, tempted to let him succeed or falter on his own; if the world was truly a place defined by Darwin’s dictum of survival of the fittest, shouldn’t those same rules apply to him as to the sapien humanity he desired to supplant? But even as she acknowledged that consideration she found herself establishing a link between the two of them, on a level so slight he couldn’t possibly be aware of it, but which allowed her to share her own energies with him, granting him a sufficient reservoir of strength to complete his task.

The bridge passed Fort Mason, depositing as it did so a few more stray cars from the end of the roadway, a line of near misses across Aquatic Park, leading to a couple of direct hits smack into the belly of a Scarab cigarette boat moored at Hyde Street Pier, along with the working trawler tied up just beyond it, and lastly some dot-com zillionaire’s Lamborghini doing a swan dive right through the roof of a waterfront restaurant at the Cannery, to finish out its days as the centerpiece of the bar.

By this point, people down along the shore had gotten the message and were clearing the area as quickly as they could, especially as it became increasingly obvious that the bridge was about to make a landing.

The sound it made, and the effect it had on the city when Magneto brought it to rest, reminded many of the last great earthquake. The noise struck like a physical blow and while the ground trembled only for a moment, the shock wave was sufficient to break a fair share of windows and, far more annoyingly, trigger hundreds if not thousands of car alarms along the entire breadth of downtown.

Once the bridge had settled into place, with the tower a ways offshore and what remained of the roadway extending far enough to flatten a line of waterfront structures, people regained enough confidence to gather and watch what happened next as the other tower was brought into line with Alcatraz, and then deposited.

The bottom depths there weren’t anywhere near consistent with those at the mouth of the bay itself, so the bridge ended up canted at a dramatic and awkward angle, tilting downward from city to island, with one end of the roadway suspended at a decent height above the shoreline while the other wasn’t all that much higher than the water itself.

Magneto hadn’t really cared much about the people underneath the bridge as he maneuvered it into place. He had no actual intent of killing anyone. He just didn’t have the energy to spare and besides, they were only sapiens. They were functionally irrelevant to the future he was trying to bring about, and the sooner they were shuffled off the evolutionary stage the more merciful it would be for them. As for the troops assigned to the island—this was the risk, and price, that came with the uniform.

The journey concluded a bit more abruptly than Magneto would have preferred. He was a man of sublime precision, as much as Xavier, and it irked him to miscalculate the final descent so that the bridge crashed to rest with a jolt severe enough to knock everyone standing off their feet. Only he and Jean remained upright.

He shook off the hand she’d used to steady him and, as though to prove his might to all present, immediately levitated above the crowd, giving them all a grandstand view as he hovered to the forefront of the bridge and used his powers to partially collapse that end of the roadway, combining it with a gathering of debris from the crushed barracks to form an easily negotiable ramp from bridge to island. Beyond, at the highest point, rose the cellblocks.