Marc pulled the jeep over about seventy yards from the place just so they could catch their breath. How fucking weird was that? It was like the air got thick, turned into a semi-gelatinous liquid that the lungs didn't want to process. He wanted to ask the Jean thing about that, but she was no longer in the back seat, which figured.

Wesley seemed to get his panties in a bunch when he couldn't get him to respond right away, but Logan couldn't give a fuck. Was he here, panting like he'd just around the world twice? No - he was in a fucking Starbucks in L.A. having a tea and biscotti, surfing demon sites on his laptop.

Logan guessed that if the demon was serious about a swap, things would get easier, and he was right. Soon breathing became easier, not just for him either, and they were able to walk up to the ghost town. So that's what a mystical sinkhole felt like? Nasty.

Up close, the fence looked taller and yet more insubstantial somehow, like it was nothing more than a spider web. But the chain he sliced through with his claws was substantial, if slightly flimsy from all the rust.

Walking through the gate into the town was like walking into a graveyard; the place was even rank with the smell of putrefying flesh and leaf mold, even though he didn't see a scrap of flesh or a single living plant. The air was so thick with dust the sky looked sepia tone.

"Do you see anything?" Wesley asked.

"Other than nothing? No." Logan replied curtly. Something about this place was setting him on edge; it was like chewing on tinfoil.

The rusty hinges of doors creaked in the breeze, and shreds of garbage were picked up in dust devils and scattered among the empty alleys of the worn hovels. Walking down the wide dirt street that separated the crumbling wooden buildings from one another, he felt like they were gunfighters in an old Western. Except he was carrying a cell phone rather than a Colt. Marc had one of his guns out, though, but only the one - his other hand hung loose and open at his side. It took Logan a moment, but he realized that Marc had lost his gloves - he probably left them in the jeep. He had no idea if his toxin would work on demons or not, but obviously Marcus was willing to find out.

"Where the fuck are we going?" Marc asked. A good question.

"I don't know," Logan admitted, then held the phone away, and shouted, "You want me? Come and get me!"

Marcus looked at him askance. "Talkin' to dead Jean?"

Logan shrugged. "Any of 'em - I don't care." As he brought the phone up to his ear, Wesley said, "You know, provoking the demons isn't always the wisest course of action."

"Wanna tell me how else I'm gonna find 'em?"

"Look for a church."

Logan did as he asked, but it was impossible to tell the function of any of these homes, caught in a slow motion collapse. "Demons dig churches?"

"They love the irony."

Knowing Helga, he should have figured. But as they both looked for anything that might resemble a church among these ruins, he caught sight of Jean standing in the open doorway of a large rectangular shop at the end of the street. Upon seeing he noticed, she gave him that slinky smile, and retreated inside. "Dead ahead," he muttered to Marcus, jerking his head in the appropriate direction.

Marcus nodded, but pointed out, "That ain't no church."

"I know, but I just got the head's up."

"So you got a response," Wes said, sounding disapproving. "You're hard to kill, Logan, not impossible to kill . Don't forget that."

"I haven't." That was always a problem, wasn't it? He was never allowed to forget that, no matter what, this probably wouldn't kill him.

Marcus aimed his gun dead center at the doorway, and asked, "She still there?"

"No."

"Shit."

As they neared the building, Logan had to put his hand over his nose and mouth. "Gettin' hit, bud?" Marcus wondered.

He shook his head. "It smells like a fucking landfill in there." As soon as he was used to it, he removed his hand. It was still a stench that threatened to knock him flat, but he thought he could hold it together.

"Bodies?" Wes asked. Mister Cheerful.

"No. It's decay, but it's not ... human."

"Ah fuck," Marcus said, face screwing up in disgust. "I think I'm startin' to get it. Are you sure it ain't dead bodies? It smells like something died to me."

Logan shook his head vehemently. "No Human scent."

Once they were almost upon the building and the stench was beyond overpowering and hovering at the threshold of the physical, Logan could see it was the remains of a store. The front windows on either side of the doorway were so coated in the everpresent orange-brown dust that they looked like a continuation of the wall. But just beyond the doorway the floor looked like black marble, and he wondered when stores did that. He got his answer when he reached the entryway.

"What the fuck?" Marcus exclaimed.

It wasn't marble, or tile, or anything as prosaic as that - it was dead bugs. Thousands and thousands of dead insects - flies and wasps, bees and beetles, ants and mosquito hawks, moths and centipedes, spiders and scorpions. They made an ankle deep carpet of corpses, their desiccated carapaces, wings, and exoskeletons gleaming like steel in spite of the dust.

"What is it?" Wes asked.

"I think I found out why the bugs ain't so bad here. They're all dead." He took a tentative step forward, and the insects crunched under foot like dead leaves. They smelled like parchment and sour venom.

Marcus made a noise of disgust, and said, "Have I ever mentioned how much I hate bugs?"

"You're nicknamed after one."

"Scorpions are members of the arachnid family-that's different," he insisted, trying to find a bug free spot on the floor to walk on. He didn't find a clear spot, so he had to step on bugs, and grimaced as they crackled beneath his feet.

The smell was far more pungent in here, but it wasn't the dead bugs, or even the occasional lumps of feathers that could only be the remains of dead birds. It was the cases of blackened compost that used to hold fruits and vegetables, the back refrigerator case that once, long ago, held meat. It was all far beyond rotted now - it was decomposed, putrid and corrupted. It brought the insects in, but only to their death. But how were they killed? They never even got close - they all died the moment they crossed the threshold.

"Think they used some major DDT?" Marc wondered.

"Get out now," Wes demanded, in his best stern headmaster voice. "There are things that ki - " A burst of static suddenly cut through the line, distorting what words could come through. " - energ - st - ting - soul - " The phone line them went stone dead, and Logan wasn't completely surprised. As soon as Wes got some idea what they were up against, the bad guys weren't going to allow him to share that info. It was typical, really. Logan closed the phone and tucked it into his pocket.

They walked down what must have been the cereal aisle at one time, giving up the crunching carpet of insect bodies for dusty floor. Cartoon animals and the airbrushed faces of unbearably cute children leered at them from boxes so covered in grit they could have been bricks in a crumbling wall, and the figures those of people trapped inside.

Just as Logan was wondering if the choice of a store was somehow ironic, Marcus brought a hand to the side of his head, and said, "I think my infrared just futzed out on me."

Logan could now see Jean sitting on top of a counter which much have once held goods from the bakery - now it was simply a terrarium for black and green mold, growing as thick as fur on the inside of the glass case. "I can believe that," he said, glaring at her.

But she gave him that big dumb smile, eyes alight with a mirth that was cruel. She let Marc see her this time, as his gun hand shot up, but he seemed to freeze awkwardly, and Jean said, "Would you like to tell your friend why bullets wouldn't work on me even if he could get off a shot?"

Logan really hated her/it. He couldn't wait to kill it. "This thing seems to have some minor Bob like powers," he reluctantly told him. "We ain't gonna get it with guns."

She looked very smug, very pleased with herself, like he had passed some test. "Very good."

She must have let him go, because Marcus lowered the gun and put it back in the holster beneath his shirt, but with a snarling contempt. "Was Jean ever this much of a bitch?" He growled.

"Not that I know about."

The Jean thing chuckled, swinging her legs out over the front of the counter. She crossed them in a manner that might be considered coquettish under any other circumstances. "You really know how to hurt a girl, don't you Logan? Minor Bob like powers."

"Is that what this is about? You're fucked off at Bob, so you decide to take it out on me?"

She chuckled again, a throaty laugh that was more haughty than anything else. "Oh please. I don't hate Bob. He makes it hard to hate him, doesn't he? So charming and laid back."

"But he's involved in this somehow."

"Let's just say I'm intrigued at the idea of a mortal vessel for a higher being. It never worked for me, and believe me, I tried." She placed her hands on her knees, and was probably attempting to look chummy, but failed miserably. "Now I know you want me to get down to business."

"Please. This place reeks."

"You killed them, didn't you?" Marcus interjected, scowling at her. "You killed all the mutants, not the fucking oil company."

She barely twitched an eyebrow at him. "Actually, they were imprisoning mutants here. They had some secret deal with the government to help in the creation of mutants supersoldiers, ones who could get killed with no one caring. Metropolitan buying them up hardly slowed them down - after all, didn't they all share the same lobbyists and friends in very high places? But once they disturbed the seals holding us back, we liberated them. Don't you think you should be thanking us?"

"If you liberated them, where the fuck are they?" Logan wondered. He had a bad feeling about the answer.

She gave him a smile that was so oily he felt slimed. "I said we liberated them, not let them go."

"What?" Marcus asked, but he looked to Logan, not expecting a straight answer out of Jean.

It was just as Logan feared. "They killed them all right. Freedom through death."

"Oh, you make it sound so cold. We had to eat."

"You ate them?" Marc replied in disbelief.

It was her turn to scowl. "Don't be crude."

Logan looked back at the carpet of dead insects, the scattered remnants of dead birds, and recalled one of the words that Wesley had almost spit out: 'energ-'. "You're one of those energy suckers, ain't you?"

The look she gave him suggested she didn't care for the word "sucker". "Everything feeds on other things. It's what you'd call the cycle of life, yes? And mutants have much more energy than normals. Those stiffs are hardly a snack."

Marcus tensed beside him, radiating rage, but Logan knew there was no point. It was in charge here - at least for now - and all the anger and indignation in the world wouldn't help them. If there was one thing he'd learned dealing with these demons assholes, it was that they all had fatal weaknesses. The problem was finding it before you were stuck with them. "So they are zombies."

"The mutants? Oh no, we were fond of them. But the normals? Well, what else are they good for?"

"Why keep up this charade?" Marcus asked. His shoulders were rigid and he spit out the words like bullets, trying hard to swallow his rage. "Why keep the pumps goin' and the company in oil?"

"Why not, dear boy?"

"They don't want to attract attention until they're ready," Logan opined, giving her a hard stare. He could no longer see the red behind her eyes, but they seemed endlessly and fathomlessly black, like tunnels burrowing into the center of the earth. "And they almost blew it with the whole Ethan Casey thing."

"I like you, Logan - I see why Bob picked you." She jumped off the counter and started slinking towards them, head down and eyes forward, like a panther. He almost expected her to change shape. "You have no idea what happened, but you expect me to spit it out."

"I expect you to tell me what you want from me."

"Don't you mean us, kemo sabe?" Marcus pointed out. Logan had hoped he wouldn't say that.

But Jean ignored him, and so did he, although he hated to. But demons would use other people as weapons as much as anything else. "We're not demons," she said chidingly. "We're not quite gods either. We're sort of hard to explain ..."

"Demi-gods?" Marcus suggested.

She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. "Close enough. We belonged to this land long before you people started messing it up, and we were appreciated by those who lived here."

"As long as they sacrificed a virgin to you every once in a while?" Logan replied sarcastically.

She gave him a deadly "we are not amused" sort of look. "Everything has a price. Of all people, you should understand that." She then smiled faintly, as if at a private joke, and looked more like the real Jean than she had any right to. "Through a series of misunderstandings, our group was divided, and those ... misguided enough to go over to the other side turned violent. We defended ourselves of course, but there were some miscalculations, and we were all condemned to a side dimension."

"Misunderstandings, self defense - you equivocate so much, you should be a politician." Marcus snapped.

Jean continued to ignore him. "When the company shattered the seals that bound us elsewhere, we were free to walk again, but so - sadly - was the other side. They possess the last seal that keeps us from completely crossing over, and since we are evenly matched, we cannot retrieve it."

"And this is where I come in?" Logan asked, bored already.

"You mean we, jackass," Marcus insisted, sounding like he was really getting pissed off. He couldn't blame him.

"Indeed. They have some sort of "code" that prohibits them from hurting Humans, so you can go and fetch it for us."

Logan glared at the Jean thing, almost finding its arrogance funny. "No I ain't. I have no reason to let you walk the earth and do whatever the fuck you want on a wider scale."

"We have no intention of doing so, and besides, we can't. Even without the seals in place, we're bound to the earth in this location."

"This is bullshit," Marcus interrupted. "If they don't hurt Humans, than why not send your zombie buddies after it?"

"Zombies are dead Humans; meat puppets. They don't count."

Logan sighed and rubbed his eyes, already tired of this. "Even if I buy this, I ain't doin' a thing until I get Jean back."

"What?" Marc exclaimed. He snapped his head around so fast Logan was surprised he hadn't broken his own neck.

Jean gave him that sly grin again, like this was a joke only she understood. "But we can't bring her back until the seal is removed. If you want her back, you have to work for it."

"Don't fall for this," Marcus insisted crossly. "These are lying shits who want you to do their dirty work for them. They won't give you Jean back; they'll just kill you too."

"That's part of the deal," he muttered, staring at the Jean thing. "Isn't it?"

Her expression remained neutral, but her eyes seemed to glow with mirth. "It is. And we don't lie, Mister Drury - we are not demons or gods."

Marcus threw his arms up in a frustrated shrug. "You made a deal with these fucks, is that it? Knowing what they are, and after they attacked you?! Use your fucking head, Logan!"

Jean gave him a strange look, painted mouth curving down into a violent frown. "Attacked him? We never attacked him!"

And maybe the strangest thing was, Logan believed her. They didn't attack him - they weren't the ones. Which meant - if she wasn't lying - the other group, the ones that supposedly wouldn't hurt Humans, had done so. So was that not hurting Humans bit a lie ... or was there something else going on?

Logan suddenly realized they were talking to the wrong bad guys.

"Bullshit!" Marcus snapped. "You sent some - "

"Where is this seal exactly?" He interrupted. "What does it look like?" Marcus gave him a hard, open handed hit on the upper arm, and if anyone else had done that under any other circumstances, he'd have taken their head off and used it as a bowling ball.

"It's a marble crest, buried in an area beyond Plano da Noite called Alcance de Mitnal. Considering your sensitivity to supernatural energy, I'm sure you'll find it easily."

"And your fellow demi-gods are sure to show up and make a stink about it," Logan replied, trying to swallow his rage. He was being played for what, exactly - a demi-god civil war? This was such bullshit.

"Certainly. But they won't harm you."

"And of course you're tellin' us the complete truth." Marc snarled, hands curling into fists at his side. If the opportunity ever arose, he was prepared to see if his venom would work on a creature like her.

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand, and turned her back on them. It would have been the perfect time to try and attack her, but both of them were rooted to the spot in the aisle, between the shelves of ancient cereal bars and brick like boxes of Pop Tarts. Logan tried to think of a more undignified place to die, but could only come up with that truck stop men's room he was blasted into by the semi that one time, when he was helping Elena and Alex out. "Believe or not - that is your choice." She pulled herself back up onto the former bakery display case, and only once she perched there did she bother to face them and let them go. "I have simply told you what you need to know. But you should also know this - there is no leaving Santo Marco without our consent. We let you in; it is up to us to let you out."

Marcus made a low growling noise in his throat, but before he could tell her to go fuck herself or whatever he was going to do, Logan grabbed his arm, and snapped, "Yeah, we got the message darlin'. Now we have to go find some stupid marble seal." He had to use almost all his strength to get Marc to turn around with him, but Marcus yanked his arm away violently and started towards the front of the store without his help.

"There's a good boy," Jean said. He could hear the smug smile in her voice, and it made him want to run back up the aisle and lunge for her, claws extended. But he probably wouldn't even get a foot before she fucked him over in some deeply unpleasant way.

Once again they crunched through the carpet of bugs, and he only wondered for a moment how they could have extracted energy from bodies as tiny as those. Honestly, he didn't want to know.

They were just beyond the store's suffocating shadow when Marcus rounded on him, face contorted in fury. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?!"

"Look, I can't tell -  "

"You motherfucking well can!" He roared, spittle flying from his lips. "If you think I'm gonna let you throw your life away on some half - assed deal with a fuckin' demon, you're wrong!"

He glared at him, trying desperately to hold his temper in check. "I know how this supernatural shit works, okay? Trust me - I know what I'm doing."

"But you can't tell me?"

"Not here," he said, and jerked his head back towards the store. He then started walking down the dusty main street, now acutely aware of the devastation that had left this place stripped bare. The bones that made depressions in the dirt were the remains of animals - and people - that dropped where they stood when this thing - things - finally emerged. They never even had a chance, did they? He wondered how many of them were mutants, and if any of them had any idea what was happening. He could taste death and grit in the back of his throat.

Marcus followed him, but he could almost feel the resentment coming off of him like a scent. He really wanted to kick his ass, and he couldn't blame him. Logan felt like he deserved a thorough ass kicking.

They were within sight of the open front gate when Marcus said, "Did you really think you could get her back?"

"Don't start, okay?"

He didn't take the hint. "This is no time to start thinkin' with your dick."

"I'm not," he growled. But then what was he thinking with? He decided to change the subject. "If there are two groups fightin' each other, and you find yourself caught in the middle, what do you do?"

Marcus thought about it before responding. "Play 'em against one another. Optimally, both sides will destroy the other and you'll get a clear shot out."

"Then you know what I'm doin'." Or at least he hoped that's what he was doing. He felt like he could no longer see the big picture. It was a good thing Marc was here, even though he didn't want him to risk his life for this.

Marc was silent until they were out of the gate, and half way to the jeep. "So what's the deal? We go see these other demi-gods, and see what they're offering in return?"

Logan shrugged. "Got a better idea?" He caught a strange scent on the wind, and casually glanced around, not wanting to alert Marcus in case it was nothing. But where had that new sickly sweet smell of decay come from?

"No. But never bargain for the return of a dead person. Man, didn't you read Pet Semetary? Leave well enough alone."

Logan quirked an eyebrow at him. " 'Scuse me if I don't see Stephen King as an arbiter of reality."

It was then, as if on cue, that dark shapes appeared on the immediate horizon. They were the oil workers, some unarmed, others carrying pipes, heavy wrenches, and other tools that could be considered weapons if used the right way. One of them was inexplicably toting an ax.

All of them fixed their empty eyed stares on them, and started closing in on them at an unhurried pace. They would probably intercept them the moment they got to the jeep, if they didn't charge them. Logan guessed their numbers to be in the low twenties, meaning that he and Marc would have to take at least ten apiece.

"You were sayin'?" Marcus said wryly.

"Think they're after our brains?" It was an attempt at a joke, but not much of one.

"In that case, they're gonna starve," Marc replied. He really needed a recording of a rimshot to carry around with him. "Did the Jean demon just screw us royal?"

He shook his head. "I smelled this on the Plain of Night. I think it's the other ones."

"The ones that don't hurt Humans? Cute. So she was full of shit?"

"Or the others are using a loophole. They don't hurt them directly, but use go betweens for the attacks." That's what the squid things were that attacked him, weren't they? Others working for them. The Jean thing never hurt him, because the Jean thing was them. And that Jean thing was trying to scare him away.

"And zombies are just meat puppets.You gotta hate anything that works the loopholes." Marcus scowled at the advancing army of the undead. "So Mohammed, are we waiting for the mountain to come to us?"

Logan gave him an appraising look, and rolled a single shoulder in a half hearted shrug. "Bein' defensive kinda sucks."

Marcus nodded in agreement, scanning the unbroken scrimmage line of zombies. "Yeah. And let's face it - we were born to be offensive."

"It's a curse. Call dibs on the West."

"Gotcha." Marcus reached under his shirt for his guns, and shouted, "Come on evil dead, let's get it on!"

Logan roared in pent up rage as he ran towards them, popping the claws on both hands. Marcus started running towards the easternmost side of the line, and the zombies, recognizing the battle was on, started running towards them.

Even as he ran, Marc fired his guns, but rather than going for head shots (which might be iffy on the undead) or body shots, he aimed for the legs. This was why fighting Marcus was always strategically sound - undead or not, it was hard to fight when you couldn't stand up.

More zombies surged over the rise to fill in gaps as the ones who had their kneecaps blown out in bloody bursts toppled like dominoes, and Logan threw himself headlong into the human wall, punching through whatever part of the body presented itself.

He wondered if they fought their way through this, would they have to fight the entire remaining population of Santo Marco?

This was looking more and more like the worst decision they had ever made. And Logan knew - especially in his case - that was really saying something.

12

He didn't have a long time to think about it, as they were trying to bury him with the sheer weight of their numbers. He did notice, as he stabbed his claws through a zombie Meeks torso and tore him completely in half, that they hardly bled at all. There were splashes when he punched through a major artery, or Marc hit them with a bullet, but it wasn't like it was when you hit a real living person. Even when he slashed off another zombie's head, there was no blood fountaining from the neck. But then blood didn't pump when you were dead, did it?

He lashed out and sliced a pipe in half as he kicked another zombie away, the crunch of his sternum collapsing barely audible over the angry muttering of the undead, who were growing more vicious as their numbers dwindled rapidly. He felt bony fingers like claws break his skin and rip away handfuls of his flesh from his shoulder and his back (he had no time to see if they ate it), and even as he separated one zombie from his arm permanently, he saw a blur out of the corner of his eye that he couldn't quite avoid.

It was a huge wrench, and it hit him flush in the side of the head, hard enough to make the wrench head snap off and fly away on impact. Logan dropped to one knee, mind reeling and vision growing briefly cloudy, but the adrenaline in his system - along with the throbbing pain from his ripped open scalp, and the cloying smell of blood and decaying flesh in his nose - kept him from losing consciousness.

He slashed out the legs from two sets of zombies who tried to take him down completely, but he was still slower than before, and maybe that's why he didn't see the guy with the ax.

But he did feel it, as the head was buried deep between his shoulder blades.

The blade snapped on his adamantium spinal column, and the ax handle went flying over his shoulder, but the pain was indescribable. The cold blade in his skin didn't feel too great either.

As much as it hurt, he jumped up to his feet and spun, claws extended, and he sliced the zombie's arm off at the shoulder, but the heavy weight of the ax head in his back nearly sent him stumbling.

Another zombie hit it, and the metal caused a spark he could feel inside his body, a sensation he had never wanted to feel again.

He got jostled enough that the blade fell out, hitting the ground with a heavy thud, and he could still feel warm blood streaming down his back as his healing factor struggled to fix such a deep wound. It gave him a head rush as he slashed one zombie in the face and elbowed another one hard enough to fracture his skull.

Marcus was out of bullets, but from the way the zombies around him were staggering and jerking like they were in the throes of seizures, his toxin did work on the human parts of them.

Logan cut through another zombie's neck, anger at the pain of healing spurring him onward, and had just stabbed another one straight through the eyes when he stumbled forward, nearly tripping over severed limbs and fallen bodies, and raised his free, bloody claw to strike.

And found himself face to face with Jean, her pale lips curved up in a disarmingly sweet smile, and he froze.

It was what she expected, judging from the way her expression remained even. "I'm sorry," she said, actually sounding like she meant it.

"Logan!" Marcus shouted. But he was so hypnotized by her reddish brown eyes that he didn't even turn. She looked more like the real Jean, didn't she? It was something intangible ...

"We can't let you remove the final seal," Jean told him, pity shining in her eyes like tears. "I hope you'll understand."

Logan was about to ask what, but before he could, he sensed the presence behind him. There was no time - Jean had sabotaged his senses, and even his reflexes couldn't compensate.

He didn't realize his throat had been cut until the blade pulled away sharply from the side of his neck.