X-Men: The Last Stand (35 page)

Overhead, some of the fliers who hadn’t been hit made frantic, diving grasps for their fellows who had, reflexively trying to save their falling friends. Some they caught, some they missed, some yanked free of the hands that held them, and the night was broken by the sound of dull, scattered impacts, like sacks of meat striking the earth.

Thirty-five mutants had been hit.

Thirty-five men and women—although some might better be called boys and girls, they were so young—in varying stages of devolution, took their place.

“That,”
remarked Magneto from his summit on the bridge, “is why the pawns go first.” He shook his head. “Humans and their guns.”

Ahead and below, mop-up teams emerged into view—a full company of regular army, evenly split between those equipped with the dart weapons and those with riot gear, plus a contingent of medics to deal with any wounded. A Humvee rolled into the courtyard, sporting a water cannon to help the riot troops deal with the prisoners while the combat platoon took up new positions to prepare for the expected second wave.

A lieutenant spoke into his radio, tried again, then tossed the set aside in disgust; electronics were useless. Using hand signals, he passed word to his platoon sergeants and squad leaders to begin their advance. These were tough, experienced professionals, veterans one and all, who’d learned their trade in urban warfare.

Magneto faced Jean.

“Destroy them,” he told her.

She ignored him, concentrating her attention—at least in part—on the view ahead, as the last airborne mutants were picked off by snipers.

“Jean,”
Magneto snapped commandingly, in a tone of exceptional harshness,
“do as I say!”

She let him see a hint of the fire in her eyes, in her soul.

“You sound like him again.”

He met her gaze without fear.

From the island, the lieutenant’s voice rang out:
“Fire!”

A volley of missiles arced towards the bridge.

Magneto snatched up a pair of cars and brought them together well ahead of him to form a barrier, instantly flattening and expanding the metal fabric of the vehicles to form a bowl-shaped shield that enveloped the bombs the instant they detonated, to ensure not a single dart escaped.

Just as quickly, he rounded on Arclight, a tall and rawboned woman who looked as though she’d just stepped out of an ancient Hellenic portrait of some Amazon warrior battling before the walls of Troy.

“Can you control your shock waves,” he demanded, “to target those weapons and destroy them all at once?”

She looked dismissively towards the advancing troops.

“You find the right wavelength,” she replied, “everything breaks.”

“Amen to that,” agreed Juggernaut.

Arclight popped another stick of Beeman’s gum into her mouth to complement the one she was already chewing, then moved a few steps clear of the others to stand alone in the center of the roadway, seemingly intent on making herself the ideal, irresistible target. This was why Magneto had let her experiment with one of the weapons they’d claimed from the transport guards—to find the precise frequency to destroy them.

As soldiers moved warily into view—understanding full well that while Magneto couldn’t affect their weapons, there was nothing to stop him from using the very bridge against them—Arclight clapped her hands together. The air before her shook with the generation of a localized sonic boom, and visible ripples marked the progress of its energy-charged shock waves as they rolled outward towards the oncoming troops, who responded by bringing their guns up to fire.

Before a single dart could be unleashed, the shock wave was on them, shattering each and every plastic pistol and rifle they held. Stunned, the soldiers watched the darts they held clatter uselessly to the ground.

The shock waves continued their advance across the entire island, doing the same to every plastic weapon on the Rock.

As the soldiers on the bridge hastily withdrew to join their fellows on the island, Arclight turned to Juggernaut, hand upheld, and he slapped it in a high five.

“What about jets?” demanded President Cockrum of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Tanks? There’s an aircraft carrier just offshore. Can’t the
Teddy Roosevelt
launch an air strike?”

Bolivar Trask shook his head. “Magneto’ll turn them into scrap metal.”

Cockrum pounded his fist on the table in frustration. “Where the hell are our ground troops? We have to be able to do
something
!”

With the paramount threat neutralized, Magneto led his troops ashore. Jean remained at her perch on the bridge, head cocked to one side as though listening to a conversation only she could hear.

The X-Men weren’t attempting to mask their thoughts, although they had tech aboard the
Blackbird
that would allow them to try. Ororo was testing her, Jean knew: would she reveal the X-Men’s approach to Magneto? Ororo wanted to determine now, before the situation escalated, where Jean’s loyalties lay.

Truth be told, Jean still wasn’t sure.

Magneto looked, searching for the source of a sound that shouldn’t be there—the muted roar of a pair of jet engines. Jean allowed herself a rueful smile. Apparently, the sound baffles weren’t quite properly tuned.

“We have visitors,” he warned.

Ororo announced her arrival with lightning, a bolt powerful enough to illuminate the island bright as day, dazzling those who saw it almost to the point of blindness and opening a crater in the ground.

In quick succession came three more, bracketing Magneto’s cadre of mutants on all sides as Ororo streaked into view from a point only Magneto could perceive atop the main building of the prison.

While this was happening, in those precious seconds that their adversaries were reeling from Ororo’s assault, the X-Men took the field.

Hank McCoy leapt impossibly from roof to wall to roof to wall to wall, bouncing effortlessly back and forth as he made his way to a landing in the yard.

Peter Rasputin simply dropped, full metal body, like a solid steel rock—despite the risk that represented against the powers of Magneto—to make a nifty crater of his own.

Logan slid down the face of the building, using his claws to thrust into the masonry wall and slow his descent.

Kitty Pryde came down with Bobby Drake in her arms, phasing the pair of them so that when they reached ground level, they simply disappeared into the earth. A moment or so later, they popped right back up, like corks on a wave. Kitty, with Bobby by her side, clambered to the surface. She was grinning with delight. He looked ready to hurl.

“Don’t
ever
do that again.”

She rolled her eyes. Some guys were just plain useless.

The lieutenant commanding the force on Alcatraz recognized McCoy, despite his outlandish getup, and couldn’t help staring. Presidential cabinet officers don’t generally take the field of combat, much less clad in formfitting costumes.

“Pull back your troops, Lieutenant,” McCoy told him, with the full authority that only someone used to having the ear of the president can muster. “Let the X-men handle this.”

“Sir,” the lieutenant swallowed, well aware of what McCoy was asking and not altogether sure his men would follow, “this is our post, sir. Six of you, sixty-five of them. Those odds suck! We can help.”

Hank acknowledged the offer, knowing what it meant for sapien troops to volunteer to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with mutants, allowing himself the hopeful thought
Perhaps some lasting good might come from this mess.

“You’ve done your part and more, Lieutenant,” he told the young man. “Go. Now. That’s an order.”

Hank had no place in the officer’s chain of command, but such was the natural force of his voice that the lieutenant responded with a crisp salute and did as he was told.

“Mind you,” Hank mused to Logan by his side, “given those odds, he does have a point.”

Logan snorted. Hank considered that for someone like the Wolverine, with his temperament and capabilities, he probably thought of this as a fair fight.

“Get together, people,” Logan told them. “Side by side. Whatever comes, we hold the line. We defend this place, and the people in it, at all costs.”

Magneto shook his head.

“Traitors to their own cause.”
Forgive me, Charles,
he thought.
For the cause we both champion, I must destroy these children you hold most dear.
“We must finish them,” he told his mutants, and both tone and expression left no doubt as to what he meant by “finish.” As far as he was concerned, this battle would be to the death. He would ask no quarter, nor grant any in return. “Every last one.”

He turned his eyes to Jean, who met his gaze but made no other move.

At Magneto’s signal, his mutants charged. A phalanx of almost forty against a line of five.

Logan didn’t wait for them to reach him; for him the best defense was always offense.

Ten came for him, and he took them down without breaking a major sweat, without even popping his claws.

He was quick, but that was just the start of it. His healing factor gave Logan a reaction time that was significantly greater than the average sapien,
or
the average mutant. He rarely needed to think as he fought, on any conscious level; his body—working through backbrain and instinct and physical memory—did that for him. He reacted to the slightest of cues, on levels more subtle than most hunting dogs, which allowed him to begin his counter at virtually the same time, so it seemed to his adversaries as though he was reading their minds, anticipating their every attack.

For his opponents, it was even worse when bodies actually made contact. The Wolverine’s skeleton was laced with adamantium, and striking him was akin to hitting bars of a metal far stronger than steel. Punching him in the jaw invariably broke a hand and the same applied to any blunt force object like a cudgel. When he struck back, it usually took only a single blow for
lights-out.

The claws were a last resort, his ultimate weapon. He finished this initial engagement without needing them, save for a sideways slash through a lighting stanchion to drop it as a temporary barrier between one group of combatants and the next.