Wolverine: Weapon X Page 25

  Cornelius called to her. “Hines? Let it go. It’s out of our hands. I don’t think we’re a part of this game anymore.”

  Finally, a communicator chirped and the Professor spoke, his voice a rasp. “This is the Professor. Please answer … you must come in, please. Talk to me…”

  Silence greeted his plea.

  “Are you surprised that Logan didn’t kill me? Why are you doing this to me? I am not part of the rabble. You must know that. Answer me, please… don’t let me die here!”

  “We don’t have to die, Professor,” argued Cornelius. “None of us. This gun. I can use it, to protect us—”

  But the Professor ignored Cornelius, listening intently for a voice that never came.

  “I can shoot off the power packs, like you said, Professor. Give you and Ms. Hines a chance to get away. I can—”

  The shrill scrape of metal on metal interrupted them. Then a booming crash echoed off the chamber’s walls as something heavy struck the floor.

  “What’s that noise?” cried Cornelius.

  Ms. Hines covered her heart. “I think Mr. Logan has finally found us, sir.”

  The sound of footsteps followed, reverberating through the massive chamber. Suddenly, the lights flickered, the consoles grew dim. Then everything went black for a seemingly endless moment, before the battery-powered emergency lights automatically activated.

  “The power’s down!”

  “Those sounds. Outside,” hissed Cornelius. “Logan is in the walls. He’s coming through.”

  “Help me! Help me, please!” screamed the Professor into the inactive communicator. He slammed the console with his remaining fist. “Blast you … blast you for this!”

  Cornelius looked at Carol Hines. “I don’t know who he thinks he’s talking to, and I don’t care.” Then he noticed she was trembling uncontrollably. “Are you scared?”

  “Yes, sir. Very Are you?”

  Cornelius nodded. “Part of me, to death… But another part… I think I’m ready to see my wife again.”

  Hines stood close, looked up at him. “What… what the Professor said, about your wife—”

  “It’s not true. That’s what the police think, and that’s fine with me. The truth is more pathetic. I’m sure you don’t want to know.”

  “No, I do … tell me.”

  “My child was born—defective. I searched and searched for a cure for the disease, but I failed—me, an immunologist, and I couldn’t even save my son.”

  “He died?”

  Cornelius looked away. “Paul was dying … slowly. A piece at a time. I worked every day and half the night in the medical laboratory searching for a cure while my wife lived daily with our boy’s pain … saw it every hour, listened to the cries. It finally broke her.

  “One night, I came home from the lab, found them both dead. My wife had poisoned our son with some of my medical supplies and then killed herself.”

  “And the police blamed you?”

  “I let them blame me. Madeline was a Roman Catholic. Her faith, her family were important to her, suicide is a mortal sin, so is murder. It was better all around if I got the blame. I had nothing to live for without her, anyway …”

  A crash interrupted his recollections. From somewhere behind steel walls, machinery tumbled.

  Cornelius’s fingers tightened around the cold metal barrel of the automatic rifle. “Logan’s inside now. He’s got to be.”

  Carol Hines’s slight body still trembled.

  “Listen to me,” Cornelius said. “When Logan comes through here, I’ll deal with him. Finish him off distract him—whatever I can do. You get out. Run as fast as you can. Forget about the Professor—he’s gone already—and forget about me.”

  “But—”

  “Listen. I’ve had enough of this life and I’m ready to die. Probably deserve to, for what I helped the Professor do … turn a man into a monster—”

  Another crash, and the emergency lights flickered. They heard a long squeal as the turbines on the level above ground to a halt.

  “The power’s really gone now,” said Carol Hines. “The turbines for the adamantium reactor have shut down.”

  “That’s the last of our worries, Ms. Hines.”

  “The turbines maintain the adamantium coolant, Doctor. Without power, it will reduce to the charged compound. We must purge the core or this whole complex could blow up within the hour.”

  The Professor, still hunched over the console, looked up when he heard her words. “All deadwood … all burned up … blow it all and we all die,” he muttered. “Yes … that’s what I should do. Blow it all up …”

  From above, an oily substance dripped onto the Professor’s bald head. Warm and wet, he thought it to be hydraulic fluid—until it trickled down his cheek and splashed onto the deactivated consoles. Even in the dim light, the Professor knew blood when he saw it.

  He looked up just as Weapon X burst out of the ventilation shaft over their heads. A bellowing roar and Logan landed in a crouch, adamantium claws gleaming in the scarlet glow, to confront the astonished Professor. The man whimpered and stumbled back, transfixed by the sight of the thing he had toiled so long and hard to create and mold.

  Chemically enhanced muscles ripping, mane wild, flanks quivering like those of a hunting lion about to launch, Logan bared gore-flecked teeth. The virtual-reality inputs had been ripped from his face and only loose, sparking wires remained. His eyes flowed scarlet tears. His naked hide ran with ribbons of blood. The battery packs still dangled from his waist. With every heavy step he left a crimson footprint.

  “Shoot him! Shoot! Shoot!” shrieked the Professor. “Kill him while you still can!”

  But when Cornelius looked into Logan’s eyes, he saw pain, weakness, confusion—and humanity Weapon X should have struck them all down, yet Logan appeared paralyzed, wavering, seemingly reluctant to lash out, as if—his bloodlust had been spent.

  Cornelius lowered the rifle. “Look, Professor. He’s faltering. I think he’s had it. He’s too weak to attack, he’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “That blood is what’s left of our security guards, you fool! He’s controlled and programmed to kill all of us. Use the gun now, while we still have a chance!”

  Cornelius switched off the safety and raised the muzzle of the rifle, aiming from his hip. But Weapon X now seemed more human than monster, and he could not bring himself to pull the trigger.

  “He isn’t moving, Professor. He’s finished.”

  “Do as I command, Cornelius!”

  With his good hand, the Professor punched the doctor in the jaw. Cornelius flinched from the blow, his trigger finger twitched, and the M14 fired. With the weapon set to full automatic, a third of the magazine—eight shots—burst from the muzzle in less than two seconds, spraying the control room.

  Some of the bullets bounced off the floor, some struck the computer banks behind Weapon X in an explosion of silicon, plastic, and glass. But three lucky shots struck Logan in the chest, stitching across his pectorals and making him dance like a marionette until he spun into the smoldering debris behind him.

  Logan dropped. Cornelius blinked, the rifle held limply in his grip. “I … I got him. I got him. He’s—”

  With a low, throaty growl, Logan began to stir.

  The Professor screamed. “The power packs, Cornelius! Get the power packs, shoot away the receivers. Shut down his brain!”

  Still sprawled on the floor among the shattered computers, Logan lifted his chin, then shook his head to clear it. His bloody lips curled into an angry snarl when he saw—the weapon in Cornelius’s hand.

  “He … he’s still alive. Th-that’s incredible,” Cornelius stammered, his limbs paralyzed.

  “Shoot, you fool. Shoot before it’s too late.”

  Cornelius’s eyes met Logan’s. Hines screamed.

  “You blasted idiot!” bellowed the Professor.

  With a single thrust, Logan ran Cornelius through, the adamantium claws ripping into
his belly, severing his spine, and bursting through the back of his shirt. With a wheeze, Cornelius folded around Logan’s arm. His round glasses slipped from his nose, shattering on the floor, as his killer lifted him off his feet, then slammed his broken body onto the main computer console.

  A moment of awareness was left in Cornelius, no more than a final, flickering breath. Enough time to see the demon’s raging face blur into an angel’s; enough time to watch a monster’s wiry mane become a lustrous head of perfumed hair; enough time to hear his wife’s delighted laughter for the rest of eternity.

  “Idiot! Idiot!” the Professor screamed as he ran to the exit. Carol Hines followed, sobbing. At the double doors, she caught up with the Professor, tugged his good arm.

  “Stop, sir. Stop. We must go back—”

  The Professor pushed her aside. “Get away from me!”

  “But we can’t just leave him. We have to help Cornelius.”

  The Professor glanced back over his shoulder, half-expecting to be transmuted into a tall pillar of salt. Logan had pinned Cornelius to the computer terminal, and was slicing the doctor’s tormented corpse the way he’d ripped into the she-wolf, piece by gory piece.

  “There’s no helping him, you stupid woman. Can’t you see he’s dead? I couldn’t help him even if I wanted to. Neither could you.”

  The Professor stumbled through the now open hatch.

  “Where are we going?” Hines cried.

  “I must get to the reactor, so stop sniveling and pull yourself together. I need your help now.”

  Hines wiped away tears. After a final glance over her own shoulder, she raced to catch up to the Professor.

  “Yes … yes, I’m with you, sir.”

  * * * * *

  The two batteries failed almost simultaneously.

  The larger power pack directed energy through the somatosensory cortex to the central fissure of Logan’s brain, then along the top of the frontal cortex, which controls basic and skilled movements. As its reserves were spent, Logan collapsed like a balloon that had lost its air. All voluntary and most involuntary muscles were shut down at the same moment.

  The transition was so abrupt, it was as if an on/off switch had been thrown. If it wasn’t for the continued functions of the man’s brain stem—thalamus, hypothalamus, midbrain and pituitary—Logan’s lungs and heart would have stopped functioning, too, and he would have died instantly.

  The second battery powered the microwave receiver wired into Logan’s right and left frontal cortex via the direct inputs through his eye sockets. Drained of energy the cortex-suppressing waves broadcast by the Reifying Encephalographic Monitor were no longer being fed into the area of Logan’s mind that contained his emotions, his memory, and his self-awareness.

  Suddenly freed of the machine’s hypnotic thrall, Logan’s mind exploded in a psychedelic tsunami of wildly conflicting images; chaotic, divergent thoughts, and profound and intense emotions. He lay in a hallucinogenic fugue for mere seconds, but with his hyperactive brain, the passage of real time meant nothing. Bombarded by images, assaulted by sounds, he twitched and moaned, unable to absorb or comprehend the kaleidoscopic panorama. Soon the confused delusions coalesced into a piercing point of light, bright as burning magnesium, that expanded in his mind as his awareness grew.

  Logan’s consciousness reemerged from the dark depths of his unconscious on a glowing column of spiking brilliance that morphed into a spinning ladder—a pathway that spiraled down to the deepest core of his being. On each step of that ladder, a face, a name, an identity—yet all of them one and the same individual, the same soul that now inhabited the paralyzed, pain-wracked body that sprawled and spewed bile and blood on the reactor room floor.

  As he lay, awaiting death—hungry for extinction as a release from the bone-searing agony of the past months—his mind was flooded with spectacular visions of violence, of pageantry, of martial glory, and of a gleaming figure at the very center. He knew that death would not come, for that was his burden.

  He saw all the shapes he was and all the lives that he’d led, all the guises and masks which had been, which are, and which shall always be but corporeal manifestations of the “I” that was Logan. Mere physical forms shedded like snakeskin at the end of each existence, as the spirit moves on to occupy a new form, a new shape, a new individual. And for this brief moment, Logan knew and experienced them all.

  So began the melding of his past with the world’s history…

  * * * * *

  I am…

  Swathed in fur hides and uncured leather, flesh mottled with red clay and war paint. I beat back the onslaught of the Others—those who walk on two legs, who use clubs and spears, but are not men.

  The rude stone ax heavy in my hairy hands, I smash skulls like eggs and, ravenous after the battle, I feast on my enemies’ hearts and wash in their blood.

  Called the Hand of God, I wield a sword made of bronze. My shield is leather and beaten lead. I fought and I died in the desert sands of Jerusalem, struck down by the demon Ba’al in a holy war long forgotten by mankind, though it echoes through eternity.

  Here I die with my king, arrow-pierced Leonidas, as the Persian chariots burst through the Spartan defenses at the mountain pass called Thermopylae.

  At Carrhae, I retreat with Cassius’s legions, cut to pieces by the Parthians who tricked the Legionnaires into breaking formation, then massacred the Roman troops with cavalry.

  In burnished steel armor, astride a stirrupless saddle, I beat back the Huns who seek to destroy Roman civilization and thrust the world into the ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages.

  I ride a Mongol pony into Samarkand with Genghis Khan. We leave mounds of sun-bleached skulls and utter desolation in our wake. Harvesters of death.

  My chain mail encrusted with rust and sweat-salt, I hack my way over prostrate Jerusalem’s walls with the Knights Templars. I put the Infidel to the sword and liberate the Holy Lands in the name of my most holy Pontiff; Urban the Second.

  At Bosworth, I wear a white rose and die in the marsh during Lord Stanley’s bloody advance.

  I am captain of the mercenaries, I besiege Magdeburg with the Roman Catholic armies of Gustavus Adolphus. No one could stop us. Overwhelm the Hessian defenders and butcher thirty thousand Protestant men, women, and children.

  Both sides fight for the glory of God. I fight for plunder.

  Wind chimes tinkle in the chill night air. The garden sparkles with crystalline ice. I wear a sky blue silk kimono; my skin is yellow. I dance in the falling flakes, silver blade flashing, dark ninja blood staining the virgin snow as black-clad forms fall dead at my feet.

  Perfectly dealt, my strokes slash out a haiku of death, each cut a decapitation, each lunge a disembowelment.

  I fight for the emperor and my shogun master.

  I trek across the deserts of Egypt and the steppes of Russia with Napoleon. Our triumphs, our cruelty are legendary our retreat through a freezing hell our penance.

  At Veracruz, we remembered the Alamo by invading Mexico via the sea and defeating the Mexican Army in their own streets.

  I die in a dusty ditch next to a wheat field in a place called Antietam, then spring to life.

  On the walls of old Peking, I stand side by side with heroes, to beat back a horde of Chinese hatchet men who seek the deaths of all foreign devils.

  For fifty-five days we hold, a hundred United States Marines who defeat a two-thousand-year-old empire.

  I feel the wood and fabric of my SPAD shudder under the chattering machine guns. I watch a Fokker DVII crumple in the air, its wings burning as it plunges, spinning, to the Western Front far, far below.

  I love a Blackfoot Indian girl named Silver Fox.

  I meet Hemingway in Spain.

  I fight in the trenches, breathe poison gas.

  I parachute into Normandy on D-day.

  I wage war in Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Algeria, I
stanbul, and Peking.

  In Jerusalem, in Actium, Rome, Paris, Fort Pitt, Yorktown, Moscow, Osaka, Cambrai, Flanders, Belleau Wood, Guernica, the Sahara, Caen, Berlin, Dien Bien Phu, and Hanoi.

  All of them were me. Me. The Eternal Warrior. The Hand of God, the Master of War. An immortal spirit with no beginning and perhaps no end, only an eternity of suffering and strife and the tide of battle. No peace, no rest. No love, no family, no home. The sword my only mistress, the battle-rent banner my testament.

  With stone and wood, with bronze and iron, with steel and adamantium as my tools, my weapons, I live the warrior’s life, die the warrior’s death a thousand times over. My lives line up behind me on parade, and I can see them all, like dim silhouettes marching over Golgotha.

  I’ve suffered the spear’s tip and the headsman’s ax, the slashing sword, the arrow’s pierce, the crossbow’s bolt.

  I’ve drowned. Been burned. Crucified. Blown asunder. Felt the hangman’s noose.

  And in the end, all that pain ever led to was a finality that is never truly a climax, only another beginning in the endless, eternal cycle of blood and conflict, as inevitable as the rising sun, the phases of the moon, the passing of stars, the falling rain.

  * * * * *

  Logan awoke as if from a long dream.

  An endless parade of death . . . yet no release. Not for me…

  Like smoke the wisps of memory scattered; the soul—shattering insights, the revelation of Logan’s peculiar genesis and unique destiny forgotten, buried in his subconscious for a day, a century—or perhaps forever.

  With blood-caked hands, Logan reached up to clutch the edge of the computer console. He opened his eyes, but even the dim emergency lights seemed too bright, too blinding, and he blinked against the glare. Pulling himself to his feet, Logan rose on unsteady legs and found himself standing over a corpse.

  The man was middle-aged, with a reddish-brown beard, round glasses fallen from a ruined face, eyes closed as if in repose, lips frozen strangely in a half smile.

  “I know this man. In a memory… from a dream… a dream of dying…” Logan’s voice, hoarse from disuse, cracked into a wracking cough. Trembling on his unstable legs, he reached up to find sparking wires dangling from his ruined cheeks. Without ceremony, he ripped them loose, wrenching the probes out of his brain in a gush of semiclotted gore.