10

Bob stood at the back of the elevator as they rode up to the eighteenth floor, while he and Logan stood on either side, and Bob started singing softly to himself by the time they passed the second floor. “It’s replayed with precision and care. Why are you even talking, you weren’t even there. So I glower and plot … I will wreck you.”

Was that a general comment on things? Logan’s theme song? Bob just being an asshole? That last one was most likely.

Logan ignored him, he was probably used to Bob singing at inappropriate times, but his fists were so tightly clenched Scott thought he could see a shadow of his claws beneath his skin. Veins stood out on his arms like worms, and he looked like he was about to physically explode out of his skin. As the elevator came to a stop - finally - Bob said, apropos of nothing, “Let me take the first wave.”

Logan grunted, which was presumably an answer, and the doors slid open to reveal more security guards with tasers and truncheons, braced like riot police. “Goodnight,” Bob told them, and the half dozen out front keeled over, much to the shock of those behind them, who backed up a step.

Logan launched himself at them with a roar, shoving past the narcoleptic, and Scott briefly considered shooting him with an eye beam, but he hadn’t popped his claws. He was just plowing through the guards with his bare hands, showing absolutely no finesse but a clearly targeted brutality that took the guards out fast. One hard punch to the throat, a palm to the nose, a backhand to the temple, an elbow to the forehead, and the guards went down, pretty much out of the fight. Wasn’t pretty or organized, but he was a pit fighting champion for a reason.

As he and Bob stepped out onto the floor, avoiding the bodies of the sleeping or injured men, Bob groaned. “This isn’t good.”

Scott looked around, but all he could see - beyond the obvious violence - was an almost austerely furnished office hallway, with a window wall looking out over the city of Stockholm, bathed in a mildly blue tinged light due to an overcast sky, and it was undeniably beautiful. This was a lovely city, impossibly clean, and it occurred to him that he would like to stay here for a while, see the sights. Wasn’t going to happen, but it would have been nice. “What? Logan beating the shit out of people? I agree with you.”

“No, not that. He’s not here.”

“Who’s not here?”

Logan had reached the end of the hall ahead of them, not so much shoving the large doors of a palatial office open as nearly breaking them down, but the only thing inside it, besides expensive furniture, was a young, lanky man with a mop of pale brown hair and undeniably terrified look on his face. “Schultz,” Logan growled, heading straight for him.

The kid - who couldn’t have been more than twenty two - backed up quickly and said, panicked, “He’s not here! I - I don’t know where he is!”

“Bullshit!” Logan replied, grabbing the kid by the throat.

“Tell us where he is,” Bob said quickly, so Logan didn’t have time to manhandle him.

The boy’s brown eyes were wide and wild, staring at Logan like he was a nightmare made flesh, but Bob somehow got to him anyways. “He’s in Sareaux . He was supposed to be back two days ago, but he never showed up, and he hasn’t called. I’ve been covering for him, they think he’s here, but I’m starting to worry.”

“Sareaux?” Bob repeated, as if he knew the place. He had that over him. “In Luxembourg?”

The boy nodded vigorously. “He’s been working on a secret project there.”

“Did he say what it was about?” Logan asked, shaking the boy like a rag doll.

“No. He just said it would make us rich.”

Logan threw him aside in disgust, and turned to face Bob with a rather deadly look on his face. “You know where this Sareaux is?”

Bob nodded. “It’s in the Ardennes Mountain range, in the Northern part of Luxembourg. There’s not a lot there, beside some ski resorts and chateaus for the wealthy.”

Logan seemed to think for a minute, his eyes turning inward, and after a moment, his shoulders sagged. “Fuck. The Ardennes. That means it’s on the border with Belgium, right?”

Bob nodded, and Scott seemed to understand where Logan was going with this. Scandinavian Air made trips to Belgium, didn’t they? And Belgium really wasn’t that far from Denmark. All the pieces fell into place. It was a perfectly obscure hiding place, wasn’t it? No one ever thought of Luxembourg ever; it was such a small country that never made any trouble, it was easy to forget it existed. If he was an evil jerk, that’s exactly where he’d build his fortress. You could probably hang a big sign that said “Evil Hideout” in bright neon letters, and yet you’d never be bothered, except whenever the country did its routine census. And even then, they’d just want to know how many people in your hideout had their own car.

There was something Bob wasn’t saying, though. He was so anxious to leave he transported them back to the jet with a spell, and Logan stalked to the back while he and Bob got set up in the pilot and co-pilot seats again. “Is this another dead end, or are we going to hit the end of the line?” Scott asked, genuinely curious.

“Luxembourg has a tendency to be the end of the line,” Bob replied, sounding preoccupied. Was that a joke? He turned towards him, cobalt eyes bright and curious. “Jean kept medical records on all of you, right?”

The mention of Jean made his heart skip a beat, made his stomach clench, and he was obscurely angry at him for even saying her name, but why? It was an innocent enough question. “Basically, yeah. Why?”

“What’s on Logan’s file?”

Scott stared at him, feeling like he was missing something again. “How the hell would I know?”

“She talked to you about such things, whether you liked it or not,” Bob said, and his voice was strangely hypnotic. “Tell me what she said.”

Suddenly he was there. He could recall it vividly, not so much a memory as it was a form of time travel.

He was sitting at the dining room table in the sun room with Jean, eating lunch, keeping an occasional eye on the British and Asian kids struggling to play a game of cricket on the side lawn. The problem was no one was sure of all the rules, so the end result was a game more like a hybrid of croquet and field hockey, but the kids seemed to enjoy the sense of chaos, even if it made keeping score extremely difficult.

He was picking at his salad, trying to find the chunks of feta cheese (the only think he really liked about it), while Jean munched on fruit slices and seemed totally preoccupied. She was staring out the window, but she wasn’t looking at the kids, but past them. A slant of sun shone on her hair, making it look like a deep crimson fall of silk. “Next time Logan comes back, I need you to help me talk him into letting me do a full medical sequence on him.”

He scoffed, spearing a crumbling chunk of feta with his fork. “Is he coming back? Pity.”

“Scott,” she said warningly, looking at him across the table.

“Look, haven’t you done a sequence on him already?”

“I’ve done a scan, not a sequence. I took some base readings, but they were … not as illuminating as I’d hoped.”

A “sequence”, in Jean speak, was a whole battery of tests: blood work, cardiogram, organ function, everything up to - but not necessarily ruling out - an EEG. “But you had him in your lab a while before he woke up. Didn’t you get anything then?”

“I got a number of things. Which is the problem.”

He chewed his chunk of feta, considering that, and wondered if he should be bothered at the light in her eyes. It was the look she got when she had found a new puzzle she just had to solve, and it was worrisome, because she got very passionate and obsessive about her puzzles. Damn it - if Logan could just be straightforward and not at all mysterious, she wouldn’t even think twice about him. Was that too much to ask? “I don’t understand.”

“When you brought him in, he had a high fever, and his blood pressure and heart rate was astonishingly high, but continued to drop steadily for no obvious reason - at the time. I did figure out it was a result of his healing factor; for a few seconds, I worried he might be on the verge of a heart attack.”

“So the readings are skewed?”

“They’re incomplete. I have no idea what his base blood pressure is, nor his regular heart rate. All I can tell you is that when he’s healing from a severe trauma, they can both spike into near critical levels.”

“Uh, wouldn’t that make things worse?”

She glanced down at her plate, searching for another tangerine wedge. She found one and stabbed it through the middle, making a small sputter of juice spit out. “You’d think, but he’s not normal, Scott.”

“Wow, really? And here I thought he was just into helmet hair.”

She looked back at him, scowling, which he expected. But how could he resist a joke like that? “Ha ha. See, that’s the problem I’m having. What would be fatal for us isn’t for him, and I’m not just talking about stab wounds. His body has a different threshold of acceptability, what it can tolerate and what it can’t. His base rate is probably normal - more or less - but his upper limit might be amazingly high. It goes back to what makes his healing factor work, I think, but I‘d like to study him more to prove it.”

He really didn’t want her “studying” him, but he didn’t know why. He trusted Jean; she wouldn’t be even remotely attracted to the hairy train wreck that was Logan. But she might be attracted to the puzzle he represented. “You have no theories?”

A blur of a red ball flew past the window, and the argument of whether that was in or out began. The funny thing was, none of the kids sounded too passionate about it either way. Jean twirled her fork on her plate for a moment, lost in thought. “I do. I think it’s his metabolism.”

He shook his head, not sure he was following this, but then again, the medical stuff was her arena. Now if they were talking about cars, he could more than keep up. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like your body has adapted to absorb and convert solar radiation. I believe there’s something very fundamentally different about how his body works. I think his metabolism can literally shift itself to fit whatever his needs are. If it needs to move into a hyperactive speed to help him heal, it does, with no physical consequences to him; his body can easily adapt to a shift that would kill a normal person. If it needs to slow down to a crawl, it can do that too, and again there will be no adverse after-effects. Remember that coma he fell into after Rogue drained him? His body functions, save for breathing, fell to a complete bare minimum for life, but I never needed to set up an i.v. or a catheter. I don’t want to get graphic, but his kidneys basically all but stopped functioning, but weren’t damaged in the least. It was like he dropped into some form of biological stasis until his body could repair the majority of the damage, and then his functions started coming b! ack across the board. His body can take more then external shocks; he can take internal stresses as well. He could have a stroke, heal, and never even know it - if indeed he can have a stroke, which I honestly doubt.”

“So he has a gear shift metabolism?” She grimaced at him, like he was making a bad joke, but he was serious. “Can he control it? I mean, can he “will” it into high gear or low?”

She considered that a moment, but was forced to shrug. “I think it’s autonomic, but I really don’t know. That’s why I’d like to run a full sequence on him, when he isn’t injured or actively healing in some fashion.”

He shook his head, peripherally aware the kids had decided to flip a coin to settle their argument. Now they were arguing over who would supply the coin. “First of all, he never listens to a goddamn thing I say. Secondly, considering he was … augmented or whatever by those people, he hates medical tests, doesn’t he? So how are you going to talk him into being poked, prodded, and stabbed with needles for an hour or two?”

She sighed glumly, and sat back in her chair, lips twisting at the though. “That’s why I was asking for your help. I can’t think of a way to make Logan go along with it.”

“I’m the wrong person to ask. Ask the Professor; he can give him a telepathic nudge.”

She raised an eyebrow at that, and shook her head. “If I didn’t know you were kidding, I’d kick you under the table.”

“Good thing I’m kidding, huh?” he said, giving her a brilliant smile.

She shook her head once more and looked away out the window, so he couldn’t see her smile.

The transition was so abrupt that he felt like he had whiplash. Suddenly the memory was gone, and he was sitting in the cockpit of the jet, hands on the controls as if he’d been caught in a fugue just as he was in the middle of pre-flight procedures. He glared at Bob, and snapped, “You pushed me, didn’t you?” Part of him was furious; the other part of him wanted Bob to send him back there, but also enable him to act within the memory somehow, so he could … what? Touch her? Warn her that she should never come looking for him? Ask her why she felt the need to die?

“Holy shit, that’s it,” Bob said, a startled look on his face.

He wasn’t sure what the connection was between those two statements were, so he assumed he was talking about something else. “What’s it?”

“Logan’s gene is killing everyone.”

The feeling of whiplash increased. “Huh? But genes aren’t lethal.”

“No, but his healing factor is.”

Scott scratched his head, and felt a small lump on his scalp, barely the size of a pinprick. An insect bite? Stockholm didn’t have mosquitoes, did they? Damn global warming. “No, it’s not. It’s a healing factor, not a killing factor.”

“Ah, but it is a killer - if people aren’t adapted to it. See, Jean had it right: his body is adapted to his healing factor, in the way yours is adapted to your power. When his healing factor kicks in, blood pressure and body temperature spikes, and heart rate and metabolism go into overdrive. Logan’s body is made to take it; to him it’s nothing. But put it in a normal person, a normal person who probably has some every day bumps and bruises, a few random scars, maybe a bit of arthritis in the knee or the herpes simplex that causes occasional cold sores. The healing factor senses the damage and gets to work … and in the process, causes sudden heart attacks, strokes -”

Scott suddenly knew what he was getting at, and couldn’t believe it. “ - aneurysms.”

“It causes a lethal event, and while the factor tries to repair it, it finds it can’t. The body isn’t adapted to it, and doesn’t work with it. It’s just a big, injured, ill carrier, and the more it tries to heal things …”

“The more damage it does. Shit, it is responsible, isn’t it?”

“It would make perfect sense. All these idiots saw was dollar signs, and never bothered to do a bit more research on the fact that Logan’s body looks normal, but is far from it. The reason Logan‘s healing factor was never made into a panacea is because it can’t be, not unless humanity as a whole is fundamentally altered. If we gave your powers to a normal person, it’s unlikely they could handle it. The same is true for Logan’s, but to a totally different degree. Yours would be damaging and troubling, but not lethal. His? Yes, unless the subject was tough enough to survive it. ”

“So mutants could?”

Bob shook his head. “Some, perhaps. Not all, not by a long shot. Unless you’d like to give it a try.”

He scoffed. “No thanks. So we don’t think it’s a plague?”

“Too early to tell. It’s possible a viral vector did become contagious, and if so, it’s a hundred percent lethal to all normal people who come in contact with it - it would be the most lethal virus in the history of mankind. And all because it makes a Human body heal itself far too eagerly.”

He got the jet launched, headed towards the Northern part of Luxembourg, and only then did he ask, “Are we gonna tell him?”

Bob sighed heavily, resting his elbows on the console and staring out at the sky. “We’ll have to eventually. But maybe we should try and confirm it in another way.”

“And how do we do that?”

“No fucking idea. I’m just dreadin’ telling him.”

He didn’t blame him. He wasn’t looking forward to breaking the news to him either. “Hey, you’re a bit more of a mutant than we thought. And your healing factor actually kills people weaker than you. Bummer, huh?”

Yeah, he’d take that really well. Logan would be so thrilled, he’d probably put a hole through the fuselage.

No telling him until they landed somewhere safe.

****

He knew as soon as he stepped down on the rocky, snow dusted ground, that Marc had been here. This was the place. He found a bullet casing wedged between two rocks, glazed with a light coating of rime.

From the air, the place looked like a boxy, unattractive chateau on the edge of a rugged cliff, and it looked almost inaccessible, save from the air. According to a scan Scott did, there was an underground level to the chateau, built inside the cliff itself, which not only seemed weird, but pointless. But that meant this was probably the place - few innocent people had secret dungeons.

Logan didn’t wait for Scott or Bob. He headed off across the uneven terrain, boots crunching through the thin layer of ice beneath the snow, breath exploding before him in thick clouds. He supposed he should have worn a jacket, his skin was a layer of gooseflesh now, but he wasn’t aware of any discomfort. He’d been colder.

He was aware there was no one here anymore, but he didn’t want to believe it. Even as he broke through the front door and sprung his claws, waiting for an attack or a hail of bullets, he had hoped his sense would be wrong.

But standing there, he was assailed by odors and sights he couldn’t dismiss. There were dead bodies splayed all over what seemed to be an antechamber, the scent of blood and death and shit and fear and cordite strong enough to make his eyes water. Many of these men had been shot, but not all. All of them had within reach or in their grasp semi-automatic weapons that had been fired, many times. You couldn’t walk without kicking a spent cartridge. Blood had splattered the wall in splotches and smudges that would have made Jackson Pollock jealous, but they had all dried to an unattractive rusty brown.

He heard footsteps crunching on the snow, and soon he heard Scott make a gagging noise as he got a whiff of the room. “Ooh, this is unpleasant,” Bob said, showing he was the master of the understatement. “I guess this proves Marc was here.”

“Or someone with a small armory and a grudge,” Scott added, sounding nasal and slightly distant. He was trying to breathe through his mouth, avoiding the stench as best he could.

“It was Marc,” Logan insisted, making his way to the back of the room, where a perforated elevator shaft sat waiting, as if for a passenger. Even within all this blood, he smelled something familiar; a sharp scent, buried beneath the cordite and the slow corrosion of putrefying flesh. He crouched down, and rubbed his fingertip in a tiny drop of blood at the very edge of the shaft. Although dried, he still rubbed enough of it on his fingertip to be able to smell it, and there was no way to mistake it for anything else. “His blood’s over here.”

“Oh shit,” Bob exclaimed, venturing in through the door. Scott continued to hang back. “But it’s just his blood here, right? Not him?”

He’d already visually scanned the bodies, and knew there was no one in this room who wasn’t a Caucasian. That made it easier; he wouldn’t have to paw through day old corpses to make sure he wasn’t at the bottom of a pile. “Not on this level, no.” He looked down the shaft, and saw the elevator was on the lower level, broken cables dangling like severed veins. It wasn’t that far a drop, barely a floor.

He stood up, and jumped down the shaft.

“Logan, you fucking nut!” Scott shouted, sounding startled.

He landed on his feet on top of the broken elevator, barely feeling the shock absorbed by his legs. He dropped to his knees and plunged his claws through the metal, slicing a Human sized hatch in the roof, with a little give on either size. The metal had just fallen through the new hole when he sensed a shadow looming over him. He glanced up, to see that Bob was now standing at elevator opening at the upper floor, looking down at him. “Would you stop showing off and giving us mere mortals heart attacks?”

“Stow the shit and get down here,” he snarled. “And send Scott back to the jet. For all we know, there might be some active virus or whatever around.“ He jumped down the hole before Bob could reply, figuring he’d do the right thing. Bob was in no danger. Maybe he wasn’t a god at the moment, but he wasn’t Human either, no matter how he looked. It was a rare bug that could cross the species barrier from Human to demon.

He had to force the elevator doors open, as they were sealed shut, but it wasn’t difficult. He looked up to see that Bob had chosen to shinny down the one intact cable and jumped down to the roof from a height less like to twist his ankle or break a bone. He couldn’t heal with a word like he used to, not until the Powers stopped being pissed at him, or he found a way around it.

Bob slipped down the impromptu hatch and landed beside him. “Scott’s on his way back to the jet. He’s going to run a few more in depth scans.”

“You pushed him, didn’t you?”

“A bit.”

This underground corridor was poorly lit, with a few flickering light strips on the side walls, illuminating the few scattered corpses and walls pockmarked by bullets and stained with blood. The smell was more concentrated down here, more meaty, while the cordite was like a razor blade to the sinuses. The hall was lined with several doors, so he just picked one at random and forced it open, for some reason shouting, “Marcus!” Like he would still be here even if he was still alive.

He forced open the door to what looked like a lab of some sort, although it looked a bit messy, mostly due to the fact that stray bullets had shattered equipment and caused general havoc. Bob looked over his shoulder, and said, “Ooh, good. Maybe there’s a computer in here.”

As Bob slid past him into the room, Logan told him, “There’s no power, so it doesn’t matter.”

He tried a light switch as an experiment, and it clicked emptily, not doing a damn thing. “Huh. Good call. How’d you know there was no power?”

“Because if Marc was gonna storm the place, he’d cut the power first.”

“Ah. Well, maybe there’s some papers around, and if not, I’ll just pull a hard drive.”

He grunted and started to walk away, to the next door, when he heard Bob say, “Even if he was exposed, he might have survived it.”

There was something in the tone of his voice, an assuredness and curious presumptuousness that made him pause. He backed up to the doorway, and looked in. Bob was rifling through drawers, looking for something worthwhile. “Why did you say that?”

“’Cause it’s possible. He’s got that above average strength and natural immunity to poisons, so maybe that means he’s tougher inside and out.”

Bob continued to shuffle through the lab, ignoring the fact that he was staring at him from the doorway. “What do you know about this?”

“I know nothink!” he replied in a bad German accent, continuing his pointless search.

Logan knew he was lying; what he didn’t know was why. “You’re corporeal now. I can hurt you.”

Bob finally looked up at him, his expression both defiant and sad. “Only if I don’t see you coming. It ain’t gonna happen, Logan.”

“What aren’t you tellin’ me?”

Bob’s gaze was level, but mildly challenging. “I’m not hiding anything from you, mate, but we’re not gonna have this discussion here. Find out if Marc is still here or not, and we’ll go. We’ll talk later.”

He stared back at him, unafraid. “I ain’t agreein’ to that. You know somethin’, tell me now.”

Bob sighed wearily. “Don’t make me push you.”