“What the fuck …?” Spike exclaimed, as he was thrown to the side.

Most of them were able to avoid the flying door fragments, but most of the part demon things got caught in the flying shrapnel. Logan hit the floor (as much as it still fucking hurt), but the Wolverdemon (ha!) wasn’t so fast - maybe it was the gut wound, maybe he was just slow without his morning caffeine - but a good chunk of the door sailed over Logan’s head and nailed his demon twin straight in the chest. He went flying across the room as Logan looked to see if his suspicions about that red glimmer had been correct.

They were. Scott stomped into the room, hand raised to his visor, and shouted, “Logan! You goddamn - “

Scott stopped as he saw the demonic things rising from the wreckage around him, and seemed baffled by the appearance of so many things that looked roughly like him he seemed confused. “What the hell ..?”

“Don’t you fucking move!” Tom shouted, getting him directly in his gun sights.

“He’s one of us,” Logan snapped. “Don’t you recognize him? The Org brainwashed him for a while.” Logan got to his feet and looked around for the main Wolverdemon, He saw three others converging on him that were like photocopies of photocopies; they were technically okay, but seemed to be lacking … something. One walked with his back hunched over, and the reason why became apparent when he noticed he seemed to have four claws on each hand, about fourteen inches long, and grotesquely muscled forearms - his arms were so heavy he couldn’t stand up straight. The other had bug eyes, or maybe just those X-Files alien eyes, almond shaped and all black; he also had a distended jaw full of too many teeth, and he both growled and drooled as he breathed. The third didn’t have proper hands; his arms ended in a single thick, sharp blades that came out of the stumps of his forearms. Logan realized, with a sick feeling in his stomach, that these were the experiments, the rejects, the attempts to improve his basic model.  Jesus fucking Christ - he had underestimated the monstrous cruelty of these bastards, and he didn’t think that was possible.

“What is going on here?” Scott exclaimed, still sounding bewildered.

The hunchbacked Wolverdemon took a swipe at him with his scythe like claws, but in spite of the reach he had, he moved slow, and Logan ran at him, slicing his throat open with his own smaller (but far more maneuverable) claws; he sliced all the way down to his adamantium coated spinal cord, so his head flopped back, held on by simply that, and he collapsed heavily to the floor, spurting reddish black blood. He probably hadn’t killed him yet, but he knew he should, and put the wretched thing out of its misery.

The one with the distended jaw and the ones with the shivs for hands attacked him at once, but Logan buried a claw into the gut of the one with the jaw, even as he bit down on his upper arm, and with his other claw sliced the eyes out of the one with the shivs for hands. He still managed to slip a blade between Logan’s ribs, even as he let out an inhuman scream because his eyes were sliced in half right inside their sockets. It was basic strategy: if your opponent couldn’t breathe, see, or stand, they were effectively neutralized as a threat.

Logan was pretty sure Wolvie Knifehands had nicked the lower lobe of one lung, as his breathing felt labored now, but he didn’t give it much thought; adrenaline was roaring through his blood now, and his mind had entered that mode where all he could think of was the kill. Everything else was irrelevant.

The thing that shot those destructive beams (a riff on Reaper’s physiology?) took aim at Scott, but missed his head by several millimeters. Scott then shot back, but having had more practice with his visor nailed the thing straight between the eyes, and sent it crashing into the far wall with bone shattering force. Maybe these things had been in suspended animation or its equivalent, but they were starting to wake up, and they were getting a little faster and a little smarter.

Logan kicked shiv hands away as he snarled over losing his eyes (if he had his healing factor, it was far from permanent), and ripped his claw up and out of the black eyed one’s gut, disemboweling him. He staggered backwards as there was a big splat of various organs falling out of him and hitting the cracked floor, and even then it still took a moment for that Wolverdemon to drop to his knees. He’d probably survive it, and he knew if he allowed himself to think about it, it would be disgusting beyond all measure.

“Oh yes, you’re the one they called Cyclops,” Spider said, crushing the head of a slimy demon thing. “Well, grab a partner and start dancing, boy.”

“Where are the rest of ‘em?” Logan shouted, as he saw the blur of movement out of the corner of his eye. “Tell me Rogue is here.” The first Wolverdemon had recovered and came rushing at him, but he was ready for it. It was a standard claws first lunge, and while he wasn’t used to fighting himself, he was used to fighting in general; he spun aside at the last second, so it would just miss him, and slashed out blindly with his claw, letting the demon’s own momentum rip it through his body.

Sparks flew as the tips of his claws met his adamantium skull beneath the skin, and Logan ripped off the entire left side of its face, including its ear, which he identified before it hit the floor. And in spite of it all, he knew it wasn’t enough to stop it.

“I came here alone,” Scott shouted back, avoiding a flailing tentacle. “I’m here to kick your fucking ass.”

“You?” Chameleon snorted. She now had two machetes, and was slashing everything within reach to tiny little pieces. She looked swamped, as did the still gravity defying Spider, the lit up Xia, the spiked up Spike, and the frustrated Tom (who was out of bullets, and now using the gun as a bludgeon). Where were all these fucks coming from? “You’re just an energy slinger. I’ve killed worse than you.”

Logan went after the Wolverdemon before it could recover and attack again. As it turned, slashing and snarling, unaware of or unconcerned by the missing half of its face, Logan kicked it in the stomach, doubling it over, and retracted the center claw of his right fist as he drove the other two straight up into its face - and through its eyes. He had no idea if his claws had gone deep enough to hit the brain, but he could only hope, for both his sake and its.

“Who the hell are you?” Scott snapped, shooting down another one of those big squid things.

A tentacle wrapped around Logan’s neck and yanked him back violently, so he didn’t see the extent of the damage he had done to the first Wolverdemon, that collapsed to the blood splattered floor in a heap. At least that was a good sign.

Logan slashed the tentacle in two pieces, and he dropped to the floor as it released him with a gargling scream. Another tentacled thing had grabbed Scott from behind and flung him into Chameleon, who went down with more of a splash than a thud (maybe the machetes were the only solidified part of her), and a couple of things that moved so fast they were blurs ran out the broken doorway. “Stop them!” Logan shouted, to anyone who was free enough to pursue them. “We can’t let them out!” He didn’t actually know why, except they were probably mindless things programmed with a single mandate - kill mutants, or maybe, if the programming was imperfect, kill anything that smelled funny, was warm blooded, or even vaguely Human.

“Oh joy, a hunt,” Spider said, launching himself off the wall and following them down the hall. At least Spider had the best chance of actually catching up and killing them.

“Tom!” Xia exclaimed, as some clawed thing that looked more demon than the Wolverdemons he had been fighting punched its claws through his shoulder. Xia punched it in the head with her force field and it went flying away, but Tom dropped to his knees in agony, grabbing his arm.

Scott made a noise of disgust and struggled to his feet as Chameleon pooled into a liquid and rose up into her solid slasher form once more. “Watch it, asshole,” she snapped at him, as soon as she had a mouth.

But before they could argue about it, they were attacked in tandem by two of those giant land squid looking things; they both seemed to be swallowed by mud brown tentacles that encircled them head to foot like ravenous boa constrictors.

Logan moved to help, only to be grabbed by another tentacled thing himself. It was when he sliced it in half and looked at it that he saw why there seemed to be no end to these things: they were pooling and reforming, just like Chameleon. Holy shit - they quite literally had her liquid morphology. How the hell were they going to kill these things if slicing them up didn’t do it? Presumably they’d eventually lose molecular cohesion, like Chameleon herself, but who had time to wait for that to happen?

A badly thrown demon hit him in the back, sending him crashing down to the floor on one knee, and old black eyes - disemboweled or not - chose that moment to sink his teeth into his neck.

Even as he ripped away a chunk of flesh from the side of his throat, Logan plunged a claw through the demon’s neck and ripped, briefly catching his claws on its adamantium neck bones. Its blood - rank and smelly and far too salty - spurted all over him before it hit the ground once more, and Logan brought a hand up to the hole in his own neck. Although there was a quite a bit of blood pouring out, it mostly just tore away muscle and flesh; nothing major, nothing that wouldn’t grow back in a few minutes.

But as he was starting to stand, he felt something sharp rip into the back tendons of his leg, right below the knee, and sever them. The leg collapsed and so did he, a violent, hot pain sizzling up from the limb. He’d just hit the cement floor when he felt a savage, sharp pain - several small daggers - rammed into his side, puncturing his lung on the other side. Even before more small daggers punched down into the back of his neck and stayed there, effectively pinning him face down to the floor, he knew who his assailant was. “Spike,” he snarled, trying to figure out a way to get up or at least fight back. But Spike had plotted his assault well - it was almost impossible to do anything when you were pinned down by the back of your neck, and he’d dropped his spiky knees on his left arm, stapling it to the floor, so he couldn’t lash out. In a straight out fight, Spike had to know he had no chance in hell; instead, he planned a sneak attack where he could effectively nail him to the floor, ruling out a face to face confrontation. “You motherfucker.”

“Static had been right about you,” he said, punctuating every other would with a spiky fist. In his throat, the side of his face. “You are still the impossible man. I knew you’d figure a way to find this. But guess what, old man? You ruined everything.” Logan was pretty sure he’d just lost his earlobe on that side; the blood running down the side of his neck and face was itchy. “Do you know how close we were to finally being in place to take over the whole Organization from within? Do you? We could have had the whole thing and you ruined it. I know they blame Xavier, but I know it was you, you selfish bastard. You got your revenge, at the price of damning us all.” Spike had finally punctured the carotid artery; he was bleeding out like a stuck pig all over the floor. “Every mutant, every goddamn where, and they’re gonna die because of you. You are not getting away with it. I won’t let you. Die with the rest of us, old man.”

Why the fuck did he keep calling him old man? Logan felt weak and just a little cold, but he knew bleeding out wasn’t a sure way to kill him; he also knew the smell of so much Human blood would bring the demons a-running. It was a grave tactical error, and in spite of the pain, he knew he would have laughed if he could. Spike had made the wrong call.

When Logan heard a thud like someone throwing down a side of beef, he wasn’t surprised; nor was he surprised to feel Spike’s blood splash on him, creeping down the exposed side of his face as Spike’s punches ceased, and he seemed to waver on his knees, driving the spikes deeper into his arm. Still, he had the strength to yank his arm out from underneath him, in spite of the pain of skin being torn away, and rolled over onto his back, ready to take on the demon that had just taken Spike out.

Which was why it was such a surprise to see it wasn’t a demon. Xia was standing behind Spike, glimmering with her forcefield, her fist through Spike’s chest, right where his heart was supposed to be. Spike had died with an almost comical look of wide eyed surprise frozen on his face.

She pulled her arm out of the neat hole her force field had put in his torso, and only then did Spike finally topple over, face first onto the floor. Although he was still pretty weak and in a world of hurt (those spikes did fucking sting; he had to give him that), he looked up at her questioningly, and tried to muster his forces to at least sit up. Xia was crying quietly, a river of tears streaming down her face, but she looked miserable, sick but not sad. He tried to say something and failed, probably because of all the blood in his mouth. By the time he had turned away to spit it out, she was back in the melee, and he was riding out a wave of dizziness from moving too fast.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Chameleon shouted, as she did something that made one of the tentacle things blow up like a potato in the microwave. Its rubbery flesh and liquid organs splattered all over the cavernous hangar. “Do I look like I’m in the mood for this shit? Do I?”

Two large, coherent beams of red light sent the second land squid flying out the doorway, making it just a bit wider. “It’s their own fault,” Scott said, closing his eyes and dropping into a crouch as he blindly felt around for his visor. “Shouldn’t have knocked my glasses off.”

Chameleon actually kicked Scott’s visor to him, in a strange bit of teamwork on her part. Or maybe she just wanted him to cover up before he brought the warehouse down on their heads.

Logan sat up, aware the demons were closing in on him, but he let them have Spike - who the fuck cared if they gnawed on him like a chicken bone? But something shifted heavily in Logan’s blood soaked coat, and he remembered the phone. Oh, right. How had he forgotten about that again?

He pulled it out and flipped it open, belatedly realizing he still couldn’t focus very well. There was the little matter of blood loss, and oh yeah, one of Spike’s spikes had punctured his right eyeball; he could see nothing but red out of it for the moment (but it was already brightening - a good sign). But since this was a phone Bob had given him, it was probably pre-programmed or something. He hit a couple buttons at random, just before another Wolverdemon tried to slice his arm off.

Adamantium met adamantium, causing sparks as claws clashed with metal covered ulna, and while it hurt like fuck, the end result was Logan lost his grip on the phone. With an angry snarl he slashed back, but while he aimed to open up the gut, his questionable vision made him miss - he cut the poor fuckers dick off instead.

It didn’t scream more than make a squealing noise of pain, but he stumbled back and away. Logan winced in sympathy, and almost thought about apologizing. Killing was one thing; ripping someone’s dick off was another.

The phone hadn’t landed near him; in fact, he was pretty sure he heard it hit the floor hard enough to break. Well, there was a good idea in the toilet. Glancing around as his eye healed, he saw Xia had her arms around the injured Tom, protecting the both of them with her forcefield, while Scott and Chameleon seemed to be playing a form of pinball with a Wolverdemon and another Squiddie: Scott used controlled bursts of energy to send them right into Chameleon’s machete arm at a force guaranteed to lop something off, or at least knock the wind out of them. There was a clot of demons in the far corner, tearing Spike up like a side of barbecued ribs; it sounded like they were eating him, but he couldn’t see that well to say for certain.

It bothered him that Spider wasn’t back yet. Those things couldn’t have taken out Spider, could they have? Talk about a mixed blessing.

In spite of the burning pain in his arm (neck, face, back, shoulder, ear), he managed to get to his feet, stumbling, slipping slightly in his own blood. He was about to join the fray with a little dicing action of his own, when he noticed a figure standing out in the hallway. His vision had partially come back in his right eye; red shadows had become black ones, with some fuzzy gray light on the side. He thought it was Spider, but the shape was wrong; Spider was lank and gangly, his limbs almost too long for his scrawny body. But the guy in the hall had a good build, above average if not average.

Logan heard a gravelly growl behind him, smelled blood, and knew the original Wolverdemon was done snacking on Spike, and wanted something a little fresher. But before he could turn around, a familiar voice said, “Holy fuck, this was a kerfuffle, wasn’t it?”

Bob.

The demon things froze in their tracks, and Chameleon, Xia, and Tom seemed slightly baffled, as they had never seen Bob in action before. To prove it, Chameleon waved her bloody machete threateningly, and demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

“Bob. My phone broke, didn’t it?”

Logan knew that was aimed at him. “Got dropped.”

Bob shrugged, and entered the hangar, having a good look at the carnage as Chameleon warily prodded one of the frozen demons with the point of her blade. It didn’t react in the slightest. “Happens. No biggie.”

“Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” Scott asked him, sounding exasperated.

“You’re the Bob Wolverine talked about?” Chameleon said, talking over Scott. “He said you’re a god. Is that true?”

Bob scoffed humorously. “Heavens no.” Logan could hear the smile in his voice. “This is California - the moment you believe your own publicity, you’re doomed.”

Chameleon scowled at him, picking up that that wasn’t exactly an answer. “What the fuck are you on, ese?”

But Bob ignored that, and gave Scott an inexplicable smart ass grin. “And mate, you lie like a Belial. Nice job! There’s hope for you yet.”

Logan wondered what that was about, but it made Scott grimace and look away, flushing slightly, and Logan figured it must have been something really good. Did the Boy Scout actually step over a line - any line? Maybe he was finally starting to grow a pair.

Bob walked past them, into the main area of the hangar, and his grimace drew down into a scowl as he saw one of the giant squid things. “Oh, you poor thing, what have they done to you?” Bob must have released him as he spoke, because it moved, a tentacle wrapping around Bob’s waist.

“Hey,” Chameleon said, raising her machete.

But Bob must have stilled her, because she froze, and he put his arms around the squid thing, which seemed to lower the top half of its large, bulbous head against Bob’s torso. “There there,” he said to it, stroking the back of its leathery scalp. “I’ll get you home.”

“You speak squid?” Scott asked, although he didn’t sound all that surprised.

“It’s not a squid, it’s a Halavrin, and they don’t belong in this dimension. Poor thing’s scared to death. We’re as repulsive as all hell to it.”

“Us?” Chameleon asked. “Hasn’t it looked in a mirror? And why ain’t it repulsed by you?”

“He’s a god,” Scott said, almost disapprovingly.

“It’s not seeing me that way,” Bob pointed out, giving it a final pat on the head. Its affectionate tentacle slid off him harmlessly, and Logan wasn’t sure if it froze again, or was simply docile now that Bob had shown up. Did he look like some Halavrin god to it?

Bob walked over to Xia and Tom, who were still kneeling on the floor, Tom with a bloody hand clasped over his arm. He stared at him warily, out of eyes bright with pain, but he wasn’t stupid enough to make any hostile moves. Even Xia seemed at a loss, but that could have simply been Bob’s doing. “You’re okay,” Bob said, crouching down before them. “And sweetheart, your power is no good against me, so don‘t bother.”

Tom let out a sigh of relief, and blood was no longer pooling on the floor beneath him. Logan wondered if a main artery had been severed. Xia was looking at him with a combination of fear, suspicion, and awe, and she still seemed to be silently crying. Her eyes widened slightly as Bob stared into her eyes, and he knew he had her. “Don’t hear this,” Bob said, making a motion towards Scott and Chameleon. “No one but you, Logan. Now, you think you’re ready to talk about it?” Bob asked her. Like she honestly had a choice.

“If she doesn’t want to, don’t make her,” Logan said, surprising himself. Part of him didn’t want to know what she’d say.

“Sweetheart, it’s not your fault,” Bob told her. “You know Control was full of shit. He was gonna tell you anything to get you back where he wanted you. But that’s an interesting thing about Shrike … “

“Are you gonna let me in on this?” Logan asked.

Bob gave him a smart ass grin. “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

He glared at him. He hated him when he was like this. “Do you want me to kill you?”

That just made Bob’s grin wider. “Think you can? My aren’t we feeling grand, ‘specially for a guy with one ear. By the way, the Van Gogh look is so you.”

“Fuck you, it’s growing back.“ It was, he could feel it; it hurt like hell. “So now are ya going to tell me what’s going on here?”

Bob raised an eyebrow at Xia. “Do you want to?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, holding Tom tighter. He couldn’t hear any of this, and looked deeply puzzled.

Bob looked at him, and said, “She’s a pretty screwed up kid, Logan. The Organization had a lot of fun with her too. She thinks maybe she loved Wolverine.”

“Me?”

“No, Wolverine.”

He was about to ask him what the fuck that was supposed to mean until he got it. Wolverine - the alter ego. The one he could feel slipping back into the driver’s seat. 

“I mean, she loves ya too, don’t get me wrong, but she can’t quite differentiate between you two, although she sees the division perfectly clearly.”

“That makes no sense.”

“As I said, she’s pretty screwed up.”

Logan scratched the back of his neck, and ended up with lots of drying blood under his fingernails. “So she and I were, uh, involved?”

“No, her and Wolverine.”

This was so confusing, he decided it didn’t really matter.

“I’m sorry,” Xia said finally, trying to hold back the tears. “I never meant to hurt anyone.”

“You didn’t, hon, not really,” Bob reassured her. “Just yourself. And oh sure, you abused Logan’s trust a bit, but at this rate, who hasn’t?”

“What?”

But they weren’t paying any attention to him. Xia stared at Bob, tears still falling down her face, and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the one to tell. Get this out, and drop the guilt, okay?” He stood up, and offered Xi a hand up. She took it, and allowed him to help her to her feet. She then walked over to him, no longer crying, but her face was still glistening with shed tears, and her lower lip quivered slightly. “I never meant to hurt you, Logan,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level. “You were the most important thing to me … I didn’t mean to fuck everything up … I’m sorry - “

He had no idea what she was talking about, but in a way, he didn’t want to know. “You didn’t hurt me,” he told her, pulling her into his arms. She hugged him tightly, burying her face in his bloody chest. “Nobody hurts me for long.” If only that was true beyond the physical sense.

He rested his chin on the top of her head, and wondered why he felt both angry at her and sorry for her. He was just as fucked up as she was, if not more so, so he knew he couldn’t judge her, no matter what she did or why. And now he had decided he really didn’t want to know.

He looked at Bob over her head, and said, “How much of this can you fix?”

“What, you mean of the Frankensteinian genetic experiments? Not much. Halavrins and humanoids are genetically incompatible - I imagine they’ll die soon enough, but at least they can go home to do it. You know, they’re really peaceful beings; they just don’t belong here.”

“How did they get here?”

Bob shrugged. “No idea, and their minds are too scrambled to tell me.”

He knew how they felt. “Xia is dying. So is Chameleon.”

“Not anymore they aren’t.”

He should have figured Bob had covered that base already. “What did Cyclops do, exactly?”

Bob gave him that Cheshire Cat grin again. “Oh, I ain’t tellin’ ya. He can do that. And believe me, I
wanna see it.”

It took much more courage than he thought it would to ask, “What did Shrike do to me?”

“She was told he had some unauthorized fun in your mind, but not the what and wherefores of it. It
could be another lie.”

“Or it could explain a lot.”

“Or that, yes.”

“Should I worry about it?”

Bob made a show of thinking about it, and just his reluctance to say anything told Logan it was bad news. Finally, he said, “ No, no point.”

Because there was nothing he could do about it? “You can’t go in my mind and find all the Shrike bits and remove them? Assuming they’re still there?”

Bob grimaced, and he knew he was about to be let down easily. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Cause he was insane long before the Organization deigned to notice. And the insane can be tricky to track, especially if they’re a telepath.”

He was sure there was something Bob wasn’t telling him, but again, he found himself not really wanting to know. He wanted a beer, he wanted to get out of here, and he wanted to forget this ever happened. “You pushed me back at the convenience store, didn’t you?”

“Did I?”

Logan frowned at him. “Does anyone ever buy your innocent act?”

“Not as a rule, no.”

“So what did you push me about?”

Bob looked at him with a mischievous glitter in his eye, and a very suspicious smile on his face. “You’ll know when you’re ready to know.”

Oh, he really didn’t like the sound of that.