3

Teenagers could complain about everything.

Although to be fair, John was no longer a teenager, he just whined like one. They suited up for the cold, but while John claimed all of it wasn’t necessary since he had experienced Colorado winters and was a fire thrower anyways, Piotr pointed out that they were in Siberia, not Colorado, and he was an idiot if he actually thought throwing on a parka would be enough to protect him from the cold. John thought he was being “melodramatic”. Logan told him to shut up and gear up. He knew what was good for him, so he did.

Logan led the way out. As soon as they stood in the open hatch, John said, “Holy motherfucking mother of god, we’ve walked into a meat locker.”

“What did I tell you?” Piotr snapped.

Logan ignored them and walked down to the bottom of the ramp. He knew normal people sometimes said they could smell snow, but he was pretty sure they couldn’t. Yes, cold had a smell, snow had a smell, but it was more dense than most people knew. Different kinds of snow had different kind of scents, although all of them cut through his sinuses like a knife. They all smelled like ice, and whatever trace elements of pollution ended up in the snow, and then there was another scent, one he couldn’t describe but one he knew well: death. This was the smell of a chill so deep it was death. It was too bad others couldn’t scent it.

There were rumblings of shock and complaint about the cold, as it seemed only Piotr was truly prepared for this depth of cold, but Logan ignored them and stepped out onto the snow. It was so solid under his feet it barely gave an iota, and considering how heavy he was with all the adamantium in his body, that was saying something.

There was still random bitching, but he ignored it as much as he could, concentrating on the scents. It was difficult. Scents just didn’t linger; the wind was sharp and reasonably constant. After a moment, Pitor came up and stood beside him. “What part of Siberia did they not understand?”

“It’s a shock for most people. They expect Nome in spring; they don’t expect Arctic winter.”

“Are you picking up anything?”

“Besides snow and wolf piss? Not really.”

“Wolf piss?” He looked around, as if maybe he could pick them up. “How close are they?”

Logan shrugged. “Not very. It’s old, gotta be a couple hours old; I can barely smell it. This is their territory, but they ain’t here right now.”

“That’s good,” he muttered, trying to peer out into the darkness of the trees.

Logan was surprised to catch a sour tinge of fear coming from Piotr, shocking him. “You afraid of wolves, man?”

“No, not wolves …” he shifted uncomfortably, then admitted, “I don’t like dogs. I was attacked by a dog as a kid, and I’ve never really gotten over it.”

“You got metal skin. Why worry about dogs? They can’t bite through it.”

“I know, but that’s logical. And fear isn’t exactly logical.”

“True. Don’t worry, it’ll be our secret.”

“Thanks.”

John finally clomped over, half his face hidden by a ski mask. “Can I light something on fire?”

“No.”

“What? C’mon man, why not? I’m freezin’ my balls off!”

“Until we know what’s going on and who we’re facin’, we need to hold off on the power displays until we need ‘em.”

“I need ‘em now. I’m freezing my balls off.”

“That’s never killed anyone. Live with it.”

“Goddamn it,” John muttered, stomping away. “You want me to be a eunuch.”

“Way to use a five dollar word, John,” Shaheen said. As she joined them, she admitted, “I didn’t even know he knew what that meant.”

“I ain’t an idiot,” he grumbled.

“I’m sure the tests would say differently,” Zehra snapped.

“Okay, that’s enough from the peanut gallery,” Logan said. “Everybody shut the hell up. I’m gonna scout ahead and see if I can detect a hint of what we’re dealing with. I’ll contact you over the comm when I want you to follow. Until I get back, Shaheen, you’re in charge.”

“Going alone isn’t exactly teamwork,” Zehra pointed out.

“No, but if I get killed, at least I have a chance of waking up again. Do you?” She didn’t answer. No one answered. “That’s what I thought.”

"Well technically I do," Shaheen mentioned.

"Don't steal the advantage I got," he said, wandering off into the trees. Frankly, it would be nice to get away from everyone too. No offense to them - well, okay, some offense - but he could only take so much togetherness. People kind of cramped his style; he still wasn't used to them.

It was quiet in a way that the woods in Canada never were, not even up in the Yukon or the more remote spots of Alaska - this was the stillness of absolute nothingness. Not a bird twitched, not an insect trilled, not a bit of melting snow shattered a frozen leaf. This was emptiness; nothingness; death incarnate.

And it was wrong.

Even in Siberia, even in the crushing heart of winter, there was something. The slightest sound, not obvious to normal humans, something beyond the creak of snow or crack of settling ice. There was noise, just not obvious noise. But here it had all been clamped down, locked away in a hermetically sealed cell, and there was nothing right about that.

He walked between towering pines with roughened bark that could scrape your skin off if you were stupid enough to have any exposed, the branches heavy with snow but frozen, so if you jolted the thing just right the whole branch might come falling down on your head. There was no underbrush, no footprints in the snow. The only thing that hinted at life was the strong scent of wolf piss occasionally lingering near the base of a tree. He had not told Piotr he never had any trouble with wolves; for whatever reason, they seemed to get he was the alpha male and stepped aside, not wanting a fight with him, but it was too weird to mention. What the fuck was he, Tarzan? He just figured he smelled funny to them, Human but ... wrong. He'd never had any trouble with bears either, unless they were sick or something, and even then, he never had trouble for long. Animals seemed to get him better than humans, which was just a frightening thought. But then again, animals generally weren't out to kill him and couldn't lie, so they were better company all the way around.

At a certain point, the smell of wolf piss dissipated, basically disappearing, and that was another marker things were wrong. They had marked all these trees, so why would they stop now? Because there was something scary here, something they didn't want to bother with. The hill sloped gently upward, almost lost in the blinding whiteness, and he crested the rise carefully, tensed for action, extending his senses as far as they would go, even though the sensory input often climbed up to painful. (Yes, you could taste colors and feel smells, and it was as unpleasant as all fucking get out, which is why he'd never recommend it to anyone.) On the very top of the hill, he could see down into what was essentially a shallow depression, and in it were a cluster of rude houses: a village.

It could have been a nineteenth century village, the huts were that crude. Not made of space age materials, this was all handmade, and there was even a small storage hut made of hewn blocks of ice. A difficult task but a worthwhile one, as it was a rock hard material that would never melt around here. Roofs were uneven, doors were sans handles and probably locks. This would be a close knit group of people, for the simple reason that civilization was a hundred miles and fifty degrees away, and here you needed to band together if you wanted to survive.

But they hadn't survived. Logan knew from here the place was empty, and had been for a while. Again, there was the unnatural quiet, but there was also the fact that he couldn't smell any recent Human scents. Humans stank; you should be able to smell them a mile downwind. But there was nothing. Even the wolves had stayed away, and that was the most wrong thing of all.

Odd - it was like the wolves were trying to warn everyone.

He heard a crackle from his earpiece, and Piotr said, "Anything?"

"Nothin' good," Logan replied, deciding not to jump on his ass. He was supposed to contact them, but he was probably gone longer than he thought. "Looks like all the people here have disappeared."

"Disappeared? As in ..?"

"Gone, baby, gone. No sign of death, but no sign of life either. Follow my tracks, but proceed with caution. Something's really wrong here."

"Well, that's why we're here, isn't it?"

True enough.

Logan carefully headed down into the abandoned village, wondering if this was an abandoned Hammer horror movie set. That would explain a lot. Maybe there was a movie of theirs he hadn't seen, The Frozen Blood of Frankenstein or something. That would explain most everything.

The first house he came to he went inside. He just had to push the door open, as it hadn't been completely closed. It was dark inside, and bore the faint olfactory traces of pipe tobacco and beet soup, but very old; they were smells that had sunk into the interior wood, but hadn't been fresh for a very long time. A year? Maybe more or less; it was hard to say with any accuracy.

The table in the main room had been laid out. There was a candle in the middle of it, unlit, and two bowls of what was probably stew frozen solid; he picked them up and turned them upside down, figuring they'd make pretty lethal weapons if you threw them at someone. He'd never heard of anyone being decapitated by stew, but it would make a funny column note. The pepper shaker - there was no salt - seemed fine. So did the vodka, which he picked up and then put down. He was tempted to have a drink, but he could wait until later.

He found a rifle in the corner, wrapped up in hides and oilcloth - no shock there; out here, nearly everyone had a gun - and sniffed it, but it hadn't been fired in maybe a year. Hadn't been cleaned or oiled either, although it was in really good shape. Out here, a well tended rifle could be the difference between life and death. So whoever had been here - and there had been at least two, although they had been gone long enough that their scents were almost negligible - were natives to the area, or at least knew how to function as if they were.

There was no sign of a fight or intrusion; there was no sign of anything. People had been here, and then they were simply not. They had existed, and then, in the blink of an eye, they had stopped.

In Logan's mind, that was worse than anything. You had to give people a chance to fight back, a chance to do something, even if it was pointless. Just swatting them down like an insect offended him on a level he didn't understand. Maybe it was just a knee jerk extension of his hatred of bullies. He hated the strong picking on the weak; not like everyone else hated it, but homicidally. There was nothing worse than picking on someone who couldn't fight back, and it made him mad enough that he sometimes literally saw red about it. (And then came back to himself covered in blood, but that was another story.) Maybe it was because he thought there was no worse feeling than helplessness, and he had felt it enough that he would never admit it to anyone, maybe not even himself.

He knew the others had come because he could hear bitching outside. Oh, he was longing for a good ambush right about now.

"What's wrong with one little fireball?" John was saying.

"Kid, no means no," Shaheen said. "You don't think I'm not freezing my tits off?"

'Whoa," Kitty said.

"But we have to listen to the big boss man. You know, the scary claw guy, unless you'd like to deal with said scary claw guy when he's angry. Would you?"

"No."

"Okay then. Keep the fireball in your pants. Figuratively speaking."

“Literally would be fine with me,” Zehra said.

“Enough,” Logan snapped, walking out of the abandoned house.

“What is this place?” John asked, looking around. “An abandoned Disney project? Medieval Peasant Village - taste the oppression.”

“Cute. No, it’s a native village that’s been abandoned.”

“Abandoned?” Shaheen asked him. “Why?”

Logan shrugged. “Can’t think of any good reason. I don’t think they went willingly.”

“No bodies?” John asked morbidly, looking around as if he hoped to spy an errant corpse he somehow missed.

“No nothing. No bodies, no blood, nothing disturbed, but they left all their stuff behind, and some of ‘em were eating at the time; their dinners are still on the table.”

Kitty shivered - it could have been a mock shiver, or a real one; hard to tell - and said, “Like the Mary Celeste?”

“Who’s she?” John wondered.

“It was a ship,” Piotr told him, a frown obvious in his voice. “It was found abandoned, with no sign of what happened to the crew.”

“Ah.” John said that like he honestly couldn’t give a shit. “Well, this was productive. What now, chief?”

“There’s no sign of the others?” Shaheen asked. “None of the people we’re supposed to be looking for?”

Logan shook his head. “There’s nothing indicating we’re not the first visitors here. I think they never got this far.”

“Or they disappeared without a trace too,” Nariko commented. Did she have to bring that up? He was hoping they could overlook that possibility.

It was then that Logan heard the humming.

It was a deep thrum, very faint, but he was starting to feel it. “What the hell is that?”

They all looked around, but John was the first to ask, “What the hell is what?”

It was growing louder, though, and the vibrations beneath their feet was becoming noticeable. “Is this an earthquake?” Kitty asked, obviously alarmed. Even though she could go intangible, she was apparently afraid of earthquakes. Logan decided to make a mental note of it later.

“No, it’s mechanical,” Logan said, feeling the hairs stand up on his arms. Where the hell was it coming from? He was trying to focus his senses - it felt like it was coming from the ground, but it couldn’t have been; he didn’t hear it initially coming from the ground - track it, but it was almost impossible now. The sound had become amorphous, a tone spreading out across the landscape, echoing off the snow and the trees. He had a really horrible feeling about this now. Was this a trap? Was this abandoned village bait? But for what? And why?

“Mechanical?” John repeated. “As in a machine causing an earthquake?”

“No,” he replied, still trying to focus, figure out the target. Belatedly, an odd thought occurred to him. “Zehra, is this psychic? Is there psychic energy behind this?”

She gave him a startled look, as if the idea was either insane or scary, but Logan had no idea what she would have said, because it was that very second that he was knocked out cold.