“See if he’s here,” Bob insisted, never looking away. “Then we’ll have a chat, okay?”

He wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but it seemed like wasted breath. So he didn’t say anything, just stormed off instead. He forced open door after door, mostly finding ruined equipment, dead bodies, or both. He found a couple of dark skinned men, but neither was Marc. It was a relief, but also a frustrating mystery. Did he get out? How? And where the fuck could he go?

Then again, how did he get here? He couldn’t have walked; hiking was also out of the question. He would have been spotted easily if he came in via chopper … unless they were expecting a chopper. Fraud, or did he hitch a ride with a well placed word and an automatic weapon or two? He wasn’t here, but neither was there any obvious transport off this cliff face. If Marc survived the clash in here, he probably took the chopper. But where to? And if he was exposed to this virus or whatever, could he have accidentally carried it along with him? Were they going to find more dead bodies at the bottom of the mountain?

He continued searching the rooms, but grew more and more certain that Marcus was no longer here. In a way it was a relief - but in another way, it was pure torture. He could be a Popsicle somewhere on the slopes, and that was almost a best case scenario.

He came across a dead soldier with a large bazooka style weapon, only it had some weird extras, and was attached by several bulky cords to a heavy pack on the soldier’s back. The electromagnetic gun? That would make sense. It probably ate up the juice like no one’s business. It looked like it could still run, even though a bullet that had perforated the owner of the EMP rifle had also perforated the power pack. After a moment’s consideration, he stomped and slashed the thing to pieces. If it was a prototype - which he assumed - they could just start over from scratch.

Searching around, he found a cell phone, and just by the smell he knew it was Marc’s. It wouldn’t power up, though, so he assumed it was completely fried by the gun, hence his discarding and leaving it here. He smashed it too, just to guarantee no one would ever be able to pull any information from it.

He found a trail of Marc’s blood leading to a wall, or what seemed like a wall. Logan rapped on it, and realized it sounded far too thin and hollow. He felt along the wall until he found and seam, and then pulled - the wall slid away, silent on hidden casters. A secret back exit. How had Marc found this? But his breath erupting into clouds once more told him. Marc saw in infrared, and this had to have been the most suspiciously cold wall in the entire place.

It opened on a dark, cool space, something like a garage or a storage space, and when his eyes adjusted, he could see there was nothing in it beyond a few crates, one which was marked “Rubber Gloves” in Swedish.

Bob came up behind him, and said, “Got me a hard drive. I bet we can get a lot out of this puppy.”

Logan grunted, not really interested, and followed the faint scent of Marc’s blood into the cold darkness. Bob followed, but mainly out of curiosity. There was nothing but gloves and other random lab equipment in the crates, nothing incriminating, and he eventually found the outlet, leading to a gentle slope on the opposite side of the mountain. “Brr,” Bob commented behind him. “I can feel the old lads pullin’ up into me. Think we can go get some coats or something?”

He was cold too, in a vague sense, and his balls had already shriveled up, but he didn’t care. He knew what had happened; he could see it in his mind’s eye. Marc had shot his way in, figuring this for one of those medical labs that exploited mutants. It did, but it exploited them in a completely different way. With no one to rescue, he figured he stumbled into a trap, until it got out …

But what was the connection between here and the island off Denmark? That part was a huge blank, the unfinished ending. “There was a chopper down there, probably a small one,” he told Bob, pointing down the snow. He could still smell the fuel. “Marc stole it. But he’d been shot at least twice, possibly more. Not including …” He didn’t finish the sentence; he felt he didn’t need to.

“There’s a hospital not too far from the base of the mountain,” Bob said. “Mainly for the skiers and climbers who bust their stupid asses. He could be there.”

It sounded like wishful thinking, but if Bob wanted to play it like that, so be it. It wasn’t like he had anyone he could vent his anger on.

They returned to the jet, where Scott was bent over the console, going over various scans. As they entered, he said, “What a weird place. Whoever bankrolled this had more money than sense.”

“Most of us with money have no sense at all,” Bob offered cheerfully, flinging himself in the copilot seat. He held up the hard drive he’d pulled from the computer, and asked, “Got computers that can read Swedish?”

Before Scott could ask him if he was serious, Logan interrupted, “You know what this virus is, don’t you?”

Bob sighed, but Scott looked back at him, in some disbelief. “We know as much as you.”

He took a deep breath, and very tersely shook his head. “Yer lyin’. I can smell it.”

Scott raised his eyebrows. “You can smell lies?”

“Let’s see if we can find Marc first,” Bob interjected, staring at him. His look was just slightly challenging, as if reminding him he had no power here.

He didn’t think, he just moved, a reflex so fast that he had Bob by the throat before he could push him. Scott grabbed his arm and put his other hand up to his visor, shouting, “Don’t make me shoot you to save him!” The idea pained him so much it was evident in his voice, and he was sure Scott’s reluctance would make him slow on the trigger, no matter what he said.

But Bob never flinched, and kept his eyes locked on him. He could push him any time, and wasn’t overly concerned, which was even more infuriating. “Marcus is my friend, not yours,” he growled. “And don’t pretend otherwise.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Bob replied, his voice a grating rasp. But he made no effort to remove his hand from his throat, although Scott’s grip was tight on his wrist.

“But yer using him as a shield to avoid questions, and I don’t appreciate that. Knock that shit off now. Got it?”

Bob just gave him a “thumbs up”, and flashed him a cheesy grin. Somehow it didn’t seem wildly convincing, although he suspected he was serious. “Now tell me, what do you know about this virus? It is me killing people, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s your healing factor,” Bob replied matter of factly.

For some reason that stunned him. He already knew he was to blame for all of this, and yet after all this evasion, he hadn’t expected him to just admit it. He loosened his grip on his throat, and as he pulled back his arm, Scott let go, but he didn’t relax just yet. He knew Bob wasn’t kidding, but it sounded like a joke. “That … doesn’t make sense,” he finally said.

“I’m afraid it does,” Bob told him, not unkindly. “They thought your healing factor was the fountain of youth, and tried to introduce it into others without doing all their homework. They didn’t realize there’s a price to pay.”

Was he making this up? It almost sounded like he was. “What price? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Healing takes a lot out of you, mate. But the way you are, you don’t realize how much.”

He shook his head. “This is nonsense. What the fuck are you on about?”

“It was Jean who figured it out,” Scott suddenly exclaimed. He rubbed the area under his visor like he was scratching his eye, a nervous gesture at mentioning her name. “I mean way back, when she was … When you heal yourself, a lot of things happen - your blood pressure skyrockets, your heart rate spikes - a lot of things that a normal person would probably not survive. But they didn’t realize it when they started to use it on other people.”

He was trying to follow this, but it didn’t make sense. “But a healing factor heals those things.”

“What it means, mate, is your body is altered to fit your powers. You look normal, but you’re not. Not really. Your healing factor has to work in a certain environment to be ideal, and … well, you are it. Normal people can’t take it.”

It was like his legs had been kicked out from under him. He fell back in one of the passenger seats, and his heart sunk. But why was it such a surprise? He knew, didn’t he? “You’re saying I’m a bigger freak than I seem.” It wasn’t really a question.

“No, you’ve adapted to your own power,” Bob said evenly. “You had to, otherwise it would have killed you.”

“You’d have been like the opies,” Scott concurred. “The overpowered, the ones whose powers are killing them.”

“Adapt or die, the most basic law of evolution.”

They were trying to make him feel better, he knew that, but he didn’t feel better - he felt like the bottom had dropped out of what little certainty he had left. He knew then why Mariko was so important to him. She made him feel Human, something he wasn’t and never really could be. Nothing was going to change that. He knew he was a mutant, he always knew that - well, as far as his spotty memories went - but he always felt like he was on the fringe, not really one of them; after all, his powers were kind of questionable, weren’t they? Nothing spectacular - he didn’t get hurt, and he had these things in his hands. No big deal.

But it was. And hadn’t he always known? Hadn’t he unconsciously known he was just as mutated as the kid with two heads or poor Fidget with his jellied bones? He knew a long time ago that he should have been dead, that he had no right to still exist even though he had no idea how old he was; he could just feel the time in his bones, the ticking away of a layer of reality that had so very little to do with him.

God, that scared him - that terrified him. How many centuries would he continue to exist? Would he never die, just watch everyone else around him do it? People who deserved to live when he did not? It was a nightmare.

He looked up to see Bob still staring at him, staring through him, and Logan knew that he knew exactly what he was thinking. He hated him even more now. “Get us to the hospital.”

“Logan -” Bob began, pity in his tone.

“Get us to the fucking hospital!” he roared, not willing to tolerate his sympathy for a single second more.

Scott started up the jet, and they headed off down towards the foot of this end of the Ardennes range, leaving behind the bodies in the secret lab. Was Schultz among them? Probably; he wasn’t wearing a name tag. It would have been helpful he was.

Bob pointed out the hospital, a long, flat building that looked like a heat warped L, with a small cluster of outbuildings and a parking lot containing about a dozen cars in bright colors. From the air, they looked like toys. Scott put the jet down in a section of pasture behind the hospital, and Logan left the cockpit without saying a word, opening the hatch before Scott had powered down the secondary thrusters.

He headed out without them, and neither rushed out to follow him. Maybe they didn’t know what to say; maybe they didn’t want to know how he’d react if Marc wasn’t here.

Once inside, he approached the front check in desk, where a plump nurse sat typing on a computer. She was on the full figured side, but undeniably attractive - she had big, bright eyes, and a full mouth painted the faintest shade of purple, her dark hair held behind her in a long French braid that fell down her back. When he approached the desk, she looked up and asked if she could help him in Luxembourgish. Did he know that language? He must have - he just understood her, didn’t he?

He asked her if they had any dark skinned male patients, and she understood him, so he must have been speaking her language? She looked up at him from beneath dark lashes, almost flirtatiously, and he figured she was a good time girl, one of those who never said no to a bit of fun. He briefly wondered if he should ask for her number. But then she asked him why he wanted to know, which was a troubling question.

“Just give us a yes or no, darlin’,” Bob commanded, in his strangely casual way - as if it was really an option. Scott was with him, but hung back, and everything in his posture suggested he was uncomfortable just being here. It was probably his emotional outburst in the jet; it made Scott uncomfortable, and he didn’t know what to say to him. That was fair enough, as he didn’t know what to say about any of it.

The nurse sat up a bit straighter, and said there was. Bob made her escort them to his room, while giving them a report on his condition. A private helicopter crashed almost two days ago, on the edge of the slope. He was found inside, suffering from injuries that turned out to be mostly bullet wounds, much to their shock. They’d reported it to police, but since the victim - he had no identity papers of any kind on him (which confirmed to Logan that this was indeed Marcus, if the bullet wounds weren’t enough), so they didn’t know what to call him - had yet to regain consciousness, he couldn’t be questioned. And attempts to trace the helicopter had been strangely fruitless.

This hospital was quite small, and not really equipped to deal with such an intensively injured patient, but he wasn’t stable enough to transport yet. There were also some “oddities” in his physical condition that were a bit confusing - they weren’t sure what to make of him.

“So he wasn’t exposed to the virus,” Bob said confidently.

“Because he’s not dead?” Logan replied sharply, aware that he would be if he had been.

“Well, yeah. Also, everyone in the hospital appears to be alive.”

“So why did he report that something had gotten out?” Scott wondered, sounding confused.

That was a bit of a poser. After a moment, Bob asked him, “Did he speak the language?”

A surprisingly relevant question, and one he had to think about for a moment. “Probably not. I know he speaks French, but I’m not sure about any other languages. Some Spanish, maybe enough German to get past customs.”

“So we can assume everyone at the lab spoke a language he didn’t understand fluently,” Bob said, clearly working towards a supposition. “So he heard pieces - words but not sentences - that he understood. Let’s assume he heard that the lab was in a panic over the release of the virus, or whatever it is. Maybe he assumed they were discussing the outbreak there, when they were really abuzz over the outbreak somewhere else.”

“The island,” Logan concluded. “But what happened on the island? Why did they have it there and not at the lab?”

“Maybe it was at the lab, but it was contained. When I can hit the hard drive, we’ll know more.”

The nurse led them to a small, private room, painted in soft and appallingly bland shades of beige and egg white, where a man who could only be Marc laid swathed in white blankets and surrounded by beeping machines, a tangle of tubes like external veins dripping fluids and meds into his bloodstream, while a tube running beneath his nose fed him oxygen. His vital signs weren’t great, but they could have been worse.

“What can you do here?” Logan asked Bob, because he honestly didn’t know. Could he heal him, or was that all pure god power?

Bob sighed heavily, glancing at the monitors before replying. “I can tell him he’ll be fine, but I have no way of guaranteeing he’ll hear me. He may; he may not.”

“Shit.” He was afraid of that. But he supposed he had to be happy with the fact that they’d found Marc, and he was still alive - at least for now. A small victory, but all they had.

*****

Bob “told” Marc he was going to be fine, that he was going to recover with no ill effects, but there was no response at all: his vital signs showed no improvement, and he certainly didn’t wake up. Bob decided to try and check out the hard drive using a computer aboard the jet, so Scott went with him to help set up the interface. This was a handy excuse to leave him alone with Marc, but he didn’t mind.

Bob had also asked the nurse - whose name was Marta - to call the police who were working on Marc’s case to tell them he was conscious. An obviously lie, but Bob wanted to make sure the case was closed, and he could only do that if he could talk to the cops in person.

So Logan was left sitting in an uncomfortable chair by Marc’s bedside, watching the monitors and wondering why they didn’t change. It would have made all of this worthwhile if he just woke up. “Did you know this was connected to me somehow?” Logan asked his insensate form. He sagged back in the hard plastic chair, and answered his own question. “Naw. You’d have asked if I wanted in on the fun. At least you’d never bullshit me. So that’s why you’ve gotta suck it up and survive this, ‘cause I gotta have one friend that’ll always be straight with me.”

He noticed Marc had gotten himself a tattoo recently, on his left upper arm. It was a bright, almost metallic blue shadow of a scorpion, a silhouette with no detailing at all, and the color was bright and rich enough to stand out nicely against his dark brown skin. It was small too, no bigger than a stick of gum, and he wondered why he got it, and from whom. “You’re gonna have your own superhero logo no matter what, huh? It’s not bad. I bet you drew it and got some tattoo artist to put it on you. It looks like something you’d draw.”

For some reason, he could feel tears coming to his eyes, and he didn’t know why. He blinked them back and sniffed hard, realizing that he had been in this scenario too many times - he’d been at someone’s bedside, either waiting for them to die or waiting for them to get better. The last one had been that poor old man who called him the “Canuck” and talked about World War Two Europe like it was just yesterday. Of course, that meant he didn’t notice that he had hardly aged at all in the intervening years, and wasn’t exactly the same “Canuck” he seemed to think he knew. But if he hadn’t been there, that old man would have died alone, a forgotten hero of a secret war.

Shit, he hated this. If he was this kind of ageless freak, why did he bother having interpersonal relationships at all? Almost everyone would die long before him - how in the hell could he keep doing this? The emotional agony would be too much; it was almost too much right now.

“God, I’m a self-pitying bastard, aren’t I?” he noted angrily, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes. “You should wake up and hit me. If you had my powers, you would probably find some way to use it to help people. Me? I’m just bitching. Like having nothing but casual relationships and one night stands for the rest of my life is a bad thing. You seem to enjoy it.”

He heard a change in the sound of one of his monitors, and glanced up at them. His respiration and heart rate was increasing - not growing thready, but slowly getting back to normal. He sighed in relief. “So you heard him? Good. Or was it the invitation to hit me?” Actually, knowing Marc, it was the latter, and he couldn’t blame him. He was probably going to regain consciousness just to beat his ass down, and he’d let him if he wanted to, just to have him awake again. Well, within limits - if he hit below the belt, Marc was gonna lose a tooth.

He heard footsteps approaching, someone coming down the hall, and just from the familiarity of the gait, he knew who it was before he pushed open the door. “I think we found something,” Scott said, and then casting his gaze on Marc, asked, “Is he getting better?”

“Seems like it.”

He nodded, and even though he knew Scott really didn’t like Marc, he had the good grace to seem relieved. “I’m glad. You don’t read Swedish, do you?”

He stood up, and had a feeling where this was going. “I think I do, yeah. Need me to translate?”

“Well, we need you to confirm. Our translation software seems to be acting odd.”

He snorted derisively. “That stuff’s shit. When it doesn’t screw up the syntax, it has a tendency to strip the context, and it‘s useless when it comes to colloquialisms.”

Scott stared at him until he joined him in the hall. “So you used to be an English teacher?”

“Fuck you,” he replied sourly, although not with much heat. Where had all that come from? It sounded familiar somehow, rote, like he’d said it so many times it had become a canned speech. But since when had he ever said that to anyone? Some vestige of his “Lingo” past, churned up by his inconstant little ruin of a mind.

Back in the jet, Bob was singing to himself as he worked on an interface console in the cockpit, trying to tease more information out of the stolen hard drive. “- I will tear the petals off of you, Rose Red I will make you tell the truth … oh, heya guys. Do you know what’s really disturbing? I think Schultz was into sploshing porn.”

“Sploshing?” Scott repeated dubiously. “You’re making this up, right?”

“Nope,” Bob replied with an inappropriate type of cheerfulness. “It refers to someone who gets off on seeing people - usually women - soaking wet and often covered in strange substances, such as custard or mud or jelly, whipped cream -”

Scott waved his hands as if warding him off, and made a noise of disgust. “I don’t even want to know how you know the name of such a thing.”

“Well, it’s not like it’s golden showers or anything -”

“Stop it now, or I’ll shoot you.”

Bob turned back to the computer screen with a shrug, but Logan caught his sneaky little smile. Yeah, sometimes it was just too fun to irritate Scott. “Fine. I won’t you show you the pics then. Wanna give this a once over, Logan?”

He stood behind Bob and looked over his shoulder, as he opened a document on screen. Beside it, in a separate window, was the translation, which had obvious gaps and scrambled words, ones it was unable to translate. He scanned the translation first, then the original document, and couldn’t help but scoff. “What the hell kinda translation program is this? It’s barely coherent, and cut down an entire page to a paragraph and a half.”

“This is why we needed you, mate,” Bob told him.

He read the document quickly, and saw the pieces falling into place. “Oh shit.”

“It’s that bad?” Scott wondered.

“This is a message from Schultz to someone named Gudrunsen back at Priotech. He decided that since he didn’t want to alert rival pharmaceutical companies to the development of the … “Mercy” treatment. They called it Mercy?”

“You’re translating a proper name,” Bob told him. “It’s the Eir treatment, Eir being a Norse goddess of healing. She was so good at it, she could supposedly resurrect the dead. I believe she’s the patroness of health care workers now.”

“You know her?” Scott asked, somewhat sarcastically.

Bob shrugged. “Not personally, but I know Frigg, her best mate. She’s a bit uppity at times, but really a dag.”

Logan gave him a skeptical glance, but went back to the document. “Okay. He was afraid of the Eir treatment leaking out, so he decided to illegally conduct trials on a small group of rather healthy people in an isolated location … the island.”

“The island,” Bob agreed, and opened up another document. This was a more informal email, not addressed to anyone in particular, with a couple of typos that probably threw the translation software right off. “Here he’s panicking,” Logan told them. “The gene is … acting strange. He says here that it seems like the vector is live again, and people are dropping dead. He doesn’t know how the vector became live again … unless the gene somehow “healed” it.”

Bob groaned. “Of course, that’s it. Your healing factor gene actually healed the neutered vector, making it contagious.”

Logan stared at him in disbelief. “That’s not fucking possible.”

He looked up at him helplessly, with the tiniest of shrugs. “I’d have said so too, but we don’t know how far your healing factor can go, especially in a situation like this.”

Silence lingered, and Logan could feel it pressing down on him like a weight. It was all his fault, in more ways than one.

It was Scott who eventually broke the awkward, heavy silence. “That email was sent today, wasn’t it?”

Of course it was, that seemed like an idiotic question, but then he realized what he was getting at. “He was on the island.”

“And we didn’t find anyone living there,” Scott pointed out. “So either he died there, caught up in his own contagion, or he got out just as the dying started to occur.”

“We need to confirm that,” Logan said, grimly delighted at the prospect that Schultz might still be alive, a target for cathartic vengeance. “Is there a picture of this guy?”

“Give me a mo,” Bob replied, happily typing away. A few documents sprung open on the desktop, none that appeared very helpful, until what had to be some kind of internal security document came up. There was a small photograph on the upper right hand side of one Doctor Bernhard Gunther Schultz, and while Logan was sort of hoping for an evil, sneering caricature, all he saw was a pathetic, pudgy little man with a soft, round face, small eyes, and a fringe of pale brown hair ringing his gleaming scalp. He could have been an accountant or a civil servant of some sort; he was so average as to be anonymous. He was the perfect picture of a banal “everyman”. He should have been a leering mad scientist, an avaricious weasel you could instantly hate - instead, he could have been a depressive chiropodist.

“I don’t remember seein’ his body in the street.” Could the bastard have survived? Could he have gotten away, possibly to infect others? The cold blooded fucker.

“He probably wouldn’t be in the street,” Bob said, standing up. “Let’s go check for ourselves. We’ll be back in a bit, Scott.” He grabbed his arm, and muttered the incantation for teleportation.

In the blink of an eye, they were back on the island, standing on the cobblestone street, in the middle of a sea of corpses being picked at by birds. Many scattered in a wheeling, shrieking flock as they suddenly appeared amongst them, a moving darkness on the bloody orange sky.

The smell hit him like a physical blow, and it was worse this time. He took a moment to adjust to the hellish reek, and glanced at Bob, who looked a little blue (the equivalent of being green for him). “Ooh, this is even more unpleasant than the lab.”

“In more ways than one.” The men at the lab were armed; they fought back, assuming they didn’t instigate it all in the first place. These people had no chance to fight back, even if they had the ability.

Bob seemed to take a moment to collect himself, then straightened up, clearing his throat. “Okay. If Schultz had been here, he’d have been in some kind of guest housing. This place is too small for a hotel, but maybe there’s a bed and breakfast or a boarding house.”

Logan scanned the town, trying to avoid looking directly at the rotting, partially eaten corpses. Finally, at the opposite end of the town, he saw a chateau with a small sign hanging out front that read “Inn”. “There,” he told Bob, heading towards it. Bob followed, picking his way carefully over the bodies.

The inn was small, quaint, and contained bodies, which Logan could smell before he opened the front door. But there was another smell too, one he was shocked to pick up in a place like this. Cordite; gunpowder.

There had been shooting in this house.