Wolverine: Weapon X Read online

  * * * * *

  To Agent Franks’s surprise, the elevator doors on Level Three opened. Dr. Cornelius and Carol Hines hurried out, intent on reaching the Professor’s command center.

  “Whoa!” Franks cried, stopping them. “You can’t go that way. You’re heading for a firefight.” As if to punctuate his words, Cornelius and Hines heard multiple shots, shouts, and screams.

  “Damn it,” Cornelius said in frustration. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “I have my orders,” Franks told him, face grim as he listened to the frenzied voices over the communications network.

  “Get back in here … Losing men …monster… Bloody massacre.

  Then a security guard stumbled around the corner, one hand clutching his side where blood flowed freely from a deep gash that bared the bones of his rib cage. His other arm barely propped up the pallid Professor.

  First Carol Hines, then Dr. Cornelius pushed past Agent Franks and hurried to aid the injured men Franks and two guards reluctantly followed. The rest stayed behind as the last line of defense.

  The Professor groaned and stumbled, glasses askew, curled into a tight ball as he limped along, his stump tucked into his belly to slow the bleeding.

  “Try to stay still, Professor. And stay calm,” said the guard, laboring under his own wound.

  “I’m bleeding to death,” squawked the Professor, eyes bright with pain. Back inside the Professor’s sanctum, the battle still raged with screams and shouts and shots fired.

  “Command, we need a stretcher down here, fast!” said Franks.

  Deavers’s excited voice replied “What the hell is going on down there? Someone shut me out of the net! How can I give commands if—”

  “Sir, we need a stretcher,” Franks interrupted.

  “On the way,” came the bitter response.

  Agent Franks reached out to catch the Professor, allowing the man who’d brought him out to lean against the wall, then slump to the floor as his legs failed.

  “A stretcher is coming, sir,” Franks told the Professor.

  But when he tried to help the man, the Professor pushed him away.

  “I don’t need a stretcher, you fool. It’s my hand that’s missing, not my leg.”

  “Oh, no … oh, goodness,” Carol Hines whimpered when she saw the blood, the stump.

  The Professor took a few lurching steps, then spied his colleagues. “Cornelius,” he rasped. “Help me. Get me out of here.”

  Cornelius saw the gruesome limb, too. “Goddamn… we’re gonna have to stop the bleeding.”

  “We need a tourniquet,” said Ms. Hines, taking hold of the injured arm. “Dr. Cornelius, give me your tie.”

  Cornelius whipped the silk off his neck and Hines used it to bind the crimson stump. Franks hunched over the man who’d brought the Professor out, then stood, shaking his head. “He’s dead.”

  Suddenly more shots erupted in a blaze, followed by a frenzied call over the communications net. “We need backup! We’re—” The voice was cut off in a choking scream.

  “Who was that?” asked one of the guards.

  Franks just shrugged. “Wasn’t Cutler … maybe he’s down, too.”

  “So what do we do, Franks?”

  Franks looked at the dead guard on the floor. Then he raised his UMP and faced the others. “We have orders to stop Weapon X if the others don’t, so let’s go!”

  “Hold tight, Professor,” said Hines, indicating the knotted tie. “Try to keep your han—your arm raised. That should hold it for the time being.”

  “We must get you to the infirmary right away. Can you walk?” Cornelius asked.

  “I can run, Cornelius,” the Professor said in a voice that was surprisingly strong. “Just get me away from here. But not to the infirmary;”

  “Sir,” Carol Hines protested, “you must be seen to.”

  “We must get to the adamantium reactor hold.” The Professor pushed past them and hurried toward the elevator.

  “What? Why, Professor?” Cornelius called.

  “Because it’s the only safe place from Weapon X.”

  “But security will take care of Logan, Professor.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Cornelius. They don’t stand a chance.”

  * * * * *

  Major Deavers was a broken man. A bureaucrat without authority; an officer without a command.

  From the security center, he’d watched the monitors helplessly as his men were butchered by Weapon X. He’d screamed into the microphone, knowing that his troops couldn’t hear him—that the treasonous Cutler or maybe Erdman had deliberately blocked his transmissions. He’d pounded the console as his men died one by one, then en masse.

  But for all the shouting and pounding, Deavers failed to do the one thing that might have helped. He could have gone down to the armory; put on a suit of armor, and joined his men on the front line. But he wouldn’t.

  A manager just doesn’t do that sort of thing.

  That’s what Deavers told himself, anyway.

  Now he wasn’t sure who was alive—only that most of his men were dead. Some lay in the corridor, others near Lab Two. They were heaped to the ceiling in the Professor’s own command center.

  It’s not my fault . . . it was a rebellion . . . a mutiny.

  Deavers suspected his men had listened in on his conversation with Dr. Cornelius.

  Maybe they thought I was indecisive . . . but I argued from the start that the heavy weapons should be issued. I can’t help it f the bosses see things differently…

  Deavers blamed circumstances for those first deaths—Anderson or Lynch violated protocol, got sloppy. But he also suspected his own men believed that Conran and Chase died because he—as their commander—was too slow to react. The major also suspected his troops were angry that he didn’t issue the heavy weapons on his own authority.

  Deavers thought that judgment unfair.

  Men like Erdman, Franks, and especially Cutler. . . they don’t understand there’s a chain of command. That it’s important for someone else to take the heat for the hard calls.

  Deavers knew that Weapon X had cost someone big money. The way he saw the situation, it wasn’t up to him to decide whether the experimental subject should be gunned down or not. That kind of decision had to come from the top, from someone above his pay grade.

  One thing I learned in all my years—never stick your neck out. Not in combat, and not in management. Let men like Cutler and Erd man strap on the guns and go into the trenches.

  Yeah, the peaceniks got it right. The best soldiers are the ones who never have to fight. I learned that lesson, all right, but Cutler never did. That’s why Cutler never rose to the top.

  Deavers’s desperate rationalizing was interrupted when Specialist Rice burst into the command center.

  “Rice, glad you’re here,” said Deavers. “I need someone to go down and reconnoiter Level Three. Most of—”

  “Sorry, Deavers, I don’t take orders from you anymore.”

  Rice reached out and snatched the command card off the clip on Deavers’s overalls.

  “Hey—”

  “I need this card to access the main supercomputer for a critical download.”

  “Why?”

  “Look around, Major. The crap’s hit the fan. Too much critical data will be lost if the whole complex goes up in smoke. I’m going to retrieve it, copy it.”

  “You got orders? From who? The Professor?”

  Rice snorted. “Orders. That’s all you care about, isn’t it, Deavers? Okay, let’s say I got orders, from someone more important than you, more important than Cornelius, or even the Professor.

  “The … the Director?”

  “I have orders, Deavers. That’s all you need to know.” While Deavers watched, seemingly paralyzed, Rice opened the weapon case and drew out an automatic. Then he headed for the door.

  “Rice!” cried Deavers. “Are you and the Director going to try and fix this mess?”

 
Rice shook his head. “There’s no fixing this, Major.”

  Then Specialist Rice took off, leaving Deavers alone to ponder the ashes of his spiraling career.

  * * * * *

  “Security, Zone Three, respond,” Franks called. He and eight other men waited outside the hatch to the command center, hoping for a response from inside.

  “Security Zone Three—”

  A voice wracked with pain cut through Franks’s transmission. “Sir… we’re… we’re…”

  Then dead air.

  Franks glanced over his shoulder at the others. “Lock and load. No fancy stuff. No encirclement. Just shoot and scoot. And toughen up, too. Ignore everything you see in there except Logan… you shoot that bastard to pieces.”

  Franks slapped a 25-round magazine into his UMP “On three…”

  Three seconds later they burst into the command center, coming through the hatch firing, then fanning out to either side. Franks heard gasps and muffled groans over his headset. He had to stifle an exclamation of his own.

  In the middle of the room, Weapon X spun to face them, arms flung wide, claws extended. The creature was bent low in a feral crouch, ready to pounce. Logan was covered with gore from head to toe—and this time it wasn’t sheep’s blood.

  He stood on a mound of bodies piled two and three deep, packing the command center like a carpet of human remains. A few of the guards twitched or groaned, but most were dead and the rest dying. The walls were repainted in red, dripping darkly. Loose entrails, shredded organs, and severed limbs made the metal floor slippery.

  Logan’s eyes burned as he saw the guards enter. With a silent snarl, he took a step forward.

  “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  One of the men cut loose. Computer panels exploded under the hail of bullets. The room filled with sparks and the deafening thunder of firearms discharging nonstop. A moment later, the fire control system activated, drenching the cloud of gun smoke with a fog of blasting halon.

  “Can’t see!” someone cried.

  “He’s moving past me, Logan’s co—ack!” The call ended when the agent’s helmet microphone was severed along with his throat.

  “Look out, I—”

  A muscle-bound, two-hundred-fifty-pound guard flew out of the fog, slamming against the far wall with no more effort than it took an angry little boy to toss aside a toy soldier.

  “Pull back! Pull back!” Franks cried as he fired blindly into the soup. He heard a scream and someone stumbled out of the mist—Agent Jenkins, his torso stitched with bullets. Eyes wide, hand reaching out for help, the man went down.

  Behind him, Weapon X hurled forward. Franks fired, but the shot went wide. Then a cutting sideswipe knocked him to the ground and he landed hard, stunned.

  As Logan swept past him, Franks tried to rise but found his legs oddly tangled. He wondered if his foot was caught. When he looked down, he saw his legs flopping on the ground a few feet away, both severed at the hip. He slumped uncontrollably to one side as a torrent of blood spilled out of stumps that were once thighs.

  Dimly, Franks heard someone call his name. On the other side of the command center, propped against a shattered console, Cutler leaned, gasping. His chest gaped, lungs and a slowing heart visible behind dripping gore.

  Cutler’s mouth was moving, but his rasping voice barely registered over the communications net. Finally, as he fought for consciousness, Franks could make out Cutler’s words, which he kept repeating until he died.

  “I recognize him now… Logan. I know who he is…”

  With his last breath, Franks keyed the microphone and reported to Deavers, who’d been demanding to know their status for the last five minutes.

  “Nothing left, sir.” Franks wheezed. Then he sensed a movement nearby. With his last bit of strength. Franks lifted his head to see Weapon X looming over him. He closed his eyes and started to whisper his epitaph.

  “Sir… he’s coming… for me.”

  16

  Apocalypse

  “This is it, Cornelius. Break the seal. We will be safe here.”

  Cornelius shrugged “Yes, if you don’t count the radiation burns.”

  The Professor brought Cornelius and Carol Hines to a massive set of double, steel-plated, lead-lined blast doors. The elevator had carried them to the deepest level of the facility; where neither Hines nor Cornelius had ever been despite the many weeks they’d spent inside the secret complex.

  The atmosphere was close and stale, the corridors warm from the ambient heat of the adamantium smelter on the level above. Recessed lighting in the steel-lined corridors seemed hardly adequate to dispel the gloom. Ozone and industrial smells suffused the subterraneous chamber, which constantly boomed and echoed as a result of thousands of automatic mechanisms still operating.

  The doors themselves were branded with a black-and-yellow radiation symbol. Bold red letters spelled DANGER. Still clutching the blood-soaked tourniquet, the Professor gestured with his chin to a glass case embedded in the wall. “Ms. Hines, get that gun.”

  288 MARC CERASINI

  While Cornelius punched the Professor’s code into the keypad and swung the huge doors open, Hines broke the glass and pulled the single M14 off the rack. Two fully loaded magazines were also inside the case. She grabbed them, too.

  “Load it, please.”

  Carol Hines snapped the magazine in place and presented the weapon to the Professor.

  “Not to me, you idiot. What can I do with a gun? Give it to Cornelius.”

  Hines thrust the weapon into the doctor’s hands, happy to be rid of it. Cornelius held the weapon at arm’s length, as if it were contaminated.

  “What’s going on here, Professor? Just what do you think I’m going to do with this rifle?”

  “Fire it, Doctor. At the first opportunity…”

  The Professor led them inside the reactor room and commanded Cornelius to seal the hatch. The place was fully automated, with banks of computers, terminals, and switching and rerouting stations lining the walls. Digital readouts continually flashed the core’s internal temperature, pressure per cubic foot, and other critical information as the machines went about their preprogrammed tasks, oblivious to the apocalypse unfolding in the complex above.

  As Hines approached the central terminal, built-in motion detectors activated the computer keyboard, the monitor, the communications equipment. She set to work, and in a few seconds views from the security monitors on the upper levels appeared on the screen.

  Safe behind the sealed hatch, Cornelius turned to the Professor. “So you want me to fire this rifle, eh?”

  “You may not be able to kill Logan, but if you could shoot away the power packs on his belt harness. That should stop him.”

  Cornelius was no sharpshooter, hadn’t fired a weapon since high school. And even if he had been, the entire premise of the Professor’s theory was based on his fallacious assumption of control.

  “This is ridiculous,” Cornelius countered. “Even if Logan is still alive, the systems are down, he can’t—”

  “The system is not down,” the Professor declared. “It is in the hands of another.”

  “Who?” Cornelius asked. The bastard you were chatting up while the guards were being butchered?

  “It is not your place to know that, Cornelius.”

  “You’ve got a lot of gall, Professor. Asking me to shoot a man, but you won’t tell me why—”

  “Don’t wave your morals in front of me, Cornelius. I would think that a man who murdered his wife and child would be a little more cold-blooded.”

  An audible gasp could be heard from Carol Hines. Cornelius faced her, but she’d already turned her attention back to the central terminal’s keyboard, refusing to meet his gaze.

  “And in case you’ve forgotten,” the Professor continued, pressing his case, “not very long ago, you ordered the guards to kill Logan.”

  Cornelius nodded, face grim. “That’s right, Professor. I wanted Logan dead, but I wasn’t
willing to get my hands dirty doing it myself. The fact is, I’m not a killer. I don’t have murder in my heart.”

  “Well, you’d better find it somewhere or—” With a moan, the Professor dropped to one knee. Cornelius slung the weapon over his arm and helped the man into a chair.

  “Look at you. You’re bleeding buckets here. I have to bandage you up.”

  The Professor coughed. His face was milky from loss of blood, but his eyes were bright, their expression bitter. “I am considered deadwood, Cornelius. To be cleared away. Just deadwood…”

  “Dead meat, more like it,” said Cornelius as he removed the tourniquet. Blood trickled from the clotted stump, but Cornelius quickly covered the injury with cloth torn from his shirtsleeves. “You’re delirious, Professor. All this stuff, your wound. You’re going into shock.”

  “You are ever the fool, aren’t you, Cornelius? If that door doesn’t keep Logan back, you will soon discover what shock is…”

  Cornelius refused to be baited by a dying man, “Well, I think the quicker we can get you to the—”

  “Hines!” shouted the Professor. “Will you stop that infernal tapping! I can’t think!”

  She raised her hands from the keyboard. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. The computer shows Mr. Logan to be fully active—”

  “I knew that, blast it!”

  “His battery packs are more than eighty percent drained, soon they’ll give out.”

  “Not soon enough, Ms. Hines …”

  “No, sir. Actually, Logan is quite close. He’s in Tunnel Two. Moving in this direction.”

  The Professor pushed Cornelius aside and stumbled to the terminal. “Get away, woman! Let me get in there.”

  The Professor stared at the screen. Cornelius didn’t think it was possible after all the blood he’d lost, but the man managed to pale another shade whiter.

  “Is this terminal connected to the main supercomputers?” the Professor asked.

  “It is the main computer, sir.”

  The Professor realized they were standing directly above the buried computer mainframe. “Yes, of course,” he said in sharp annoyance as he began to type.

  Carol Hines tried to assist. “Pardon, sir … that’s not the proper code—”