X-Men: The Last Stand (15 page)

Warren noticed none of this, and if he had it wouldn’t have mattered. All he was aware of was the metronomic beat of his wings as they grabbed great gouts of air and thrust out behind him, and the feeling of climbing ever higher, rushing ever faster, through the afternoon sky. The wind rushed across his face, flushed with the unaccustomed exertion and the terrific demands he was placing on his system. He’d have to eat soon and rest. Wouldn’t do to black out from hunger at this altitude.

He was flying.

His heart pounded in his chest, pushing blood through his body like rivers of molten flame, searing him from crown to toes to the tips of fingers. He believed he was burning up, yet knew as well, with that same irrational certainty, that he’d be all right. This was where he belonged.

He was flying!

That deserved a cheer, and he gave one he hoped was loud enough for all the Bay Area to hear.

He didn’t know where he was going, and he had no clothes, no cash, no ID—but it didn’t matter. All he could say for sure was that he probably wasn’t ever going home again.

The rest, he prayed, would take care of itself.

He was flying!

He passed the Worthington Research Facility, so high and so quickly that he was barely seen—save by one.

Jimmy’s attention had been caught by the strange new shape up in the sky, and he watched without consideration of what it might be or what this might mean. He’d never seen anything so beautiful,
ever,
and was content to pass the time, however fleeting, simply enjoying it.

“Let me
out
of here,” bellowed President Cockrum, shackled at wrists and ankles and waist, and fastened to a bar that extended the length of the cell, allowing minimal freedom of movement—basically a traverse from cot to toilet to table. “God
damn
it, do you know who I am?”

He stood in the last of a line of cells, each holding its own single prisoner bound by a complex and formidable array of restraints. A hall ran the length of the single-tiered cellblock, with a fully enclosed guard station at front and rear. The entire enclosure rocked and trembled as though on moveable springs, and the air was filled with a faint and pervasive hum. It was night, and after lights-out, so the cells were mainly defined by shadow.

The guard flicked on the light for the last cell, and keyed in the feed for the master security station, plus the satellite uplink. He didn’t deviate from protocol, no matter how annoying or trivial the provocation. He was a trained professional, ex-military. This installation was operated jointly by the departments of Homeland Security and Mutant Affairs, with some help from the United States Marshals Service. The Bureau of Prisons had learned, to its sorrow, the ultimate and tragic cost of incarcerating prisoners like Magneto, after the destruction of the Mount Haven complex during his escape, and the execution of its entire complement of guards and staff. This was intended as an interim solution until a more secure facility was constructed. Now, however, with the introduction of the Worthington serum—and pending the usual avalanche of injunctions, appeals and courtroom motions—places like this, specialized prisons to hold mutant inmates, could well end up like Alcatraz Island, once the most fearsome penal institution in the land, now obsolete, good for nothing but a local tourist attraction and the occasional movie set.

Twisting his mouth in irritation at a sudden, inexplicable smear of static across his display screens, which messed up his view of the cell, the guard finished his reports and took a stroll along the catwalk for a closer look.

The president was in fine form: “I’m the president of the United States.”

Tough luck, asshole,
thought the guard, enjoying the moment.
I sure as shit didn’t vote for you.

“I demand that you release me!”

“Mr. President, sir,” he replied with unexpected good humor, “shut the hell up.”

He was finished here, but as he started back along the catwalk, his hand stayed light and ready on the butt of the weapon holstered at his side. He was rated Expert with a pistol, and before reporting to this new station had spent a couple weeks of refresher training with the FBI. He could draw and fire with a speed that would have left Billy the Kid stunned, and shoot with more precision than that legendary pistolero ever possessed.

“Please,” came a new cry from the same cell, but a little girl this time. “Please, I haven’t done anything, it’s all a big mistake, I’m not supposed to be here—please let me go.”

He glanced back in, and saw a kid who looked like she’d been snatched from her First Communion, as innocent as could be. She’d somehow taken the place of the president.

It was late, near the end of a double shift, and he was tired. The guard spoke from the heart, without thinking of the consequences.

“Keep it up, Mystique, I’m gonna spray you in the face, bitch!” For emphasis, he brandished a can of pepper spray—while his gun hand never strayed far from the pistol on his belt.

The girl responded with a smile that was way too wicked for someone her age, and with an equally unlikely come-hither look, whispered, “When I get out of here, I’m going to kill you myself.”

“That’ll be the damn day,” he muttered, although he was tempted to draw his weapon and take a shot, just to see what would happen.

The guard followed proper procedure and walked away, while behind him in the cell, the little girl shifted position, her body elongating, maturing, losing its clothes, turning a deep cobalt blue. For Mystique, nothing ventured, nothing gained. This ploy had worked before, so it was certainly worth the try. It had also told her something important: this guard was smarter than most, more careful than most, and surprisingly, more considerate than most. The threat had merely been an expression of frustration. He’d likely been dozing when her bellowing called him back to duty. Most guards she’d known would have sprayed her just for spite; he’d simply made the threat.

On the whole, a pretty decent guy.

But she’d kill him just the same.

Inside the cellblock, clocks and lighting conspired to convince the inmates that it was the middle of the night. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

They were incarcerated in a supersemi, a double-length tractor trailer, cruising the back roads of heartland America.

In the beginning, and for as long as it worked, it had been an inspired idea. With the destruction of Mount Haven, the federal government had nowhere to hold superpowered prisoners. Every attempt to establish a replacement led to an acute attack of NIMBY—
Not in my backyard, goddamn it!
—on the part of all the governors approached, as they proceeded to wrap themselves in the mantle of states’ rights. Given what happened last time, it was hard to argue the point, especially when it came to someone as personally and professionally valuable to Magneto as Mystique. That’s when the idea was pitched for a
mobile
prison.

There were a helluva lot of roads in the contiguous Forty-Eight, and a
helluva
lot of trucks. This wasn’t searching for a needle in a haystack, it was searching for precisely the right needle. One that was constantly on the move, and thoroughly shielded against Magneto’s magnetic scans. He could be standing right beside the truck and never sense Mystique’s biosignature. The number crunchers ran the probabilities of discovery and came up with a number in the billions.

How were they to know Magneto would cheat?

The first anyone was aware of it was when every vehicle in the convoy started shaking itself apart at the seams, and every electronic instrument started bugging out big-time.

The duty officer slapped the panic button, never realizing that his signal was degraded the moment it left the antenna.

That’s when Magneto stepped out into the middle of the road.

The escort drivers floored their accelerators, hoping for a chance at running him down. With a casual flick of the wrist, he sent both armored Suburbans tumbling end-over-end off the road. Same applied to the after-guard.

The supersemi driver stomped on his brakes in a futile effort to save himself as the cab was torn from the trailer and pitched through the air, soaring the length of a football field before crashing to the road in a ball of fire and torn metal.

Momentum kept the trailers coming, although the front end, deprived of the cab’s support, crashed down to the pavement and started sending up an impressive rooster-tail of sparks.

Magneto stood his ground, as casual as if this was merely a Sunday stroll through the park. As the lead trailer approached, he simply crushed it, letting the screams of tortured steel absorb those of the living inside.

By the time it stopped at his feet, he’d reduced a twenty-meter container to the size of a shoe box, while the second trailer, the longer one containing the prisoners, was altogether intact.

The moment the alarm sounded, the guard ran for his station, but the sudden disengagement of the cab and the destruction of the lead trailer left his partner sprawled on the monitor console, shocked unconscious by a massive series of short circuits as Magneto overloaded the internal security systems and the comnet. The guard himself was tossed to the catwalk right at the rear, by Mystique’s cell.

Knowing things would only get worse and that his chances of making it out of this alive were almost nonexistent, he grabbed for his sidearm regardless. He was a trained professional and he had a responsibility. The guard had sworn an oath.

That oath was his epitaph. Mystique snaked her legs through a ridiculously tiny breach in the wall of her cell, twisting her malleable form through some impossible gyrations, making herself as boneless as an anaconda so her feet could find and embrace the guard’s neck.

He felt her touch, heard her laugh…

…and she broke his neck.

“Told you so,” she said, extending her toes to the length of a chopstick, and using them to hook the keys from his belt and bring them back to her.

Magneto made his way to the back of the prison truck, where he was joined by Pyro and Callisto, who’d dealt with the last of the escort. Beneath the façade of what appeared to be ordinary truck doors was a second level that would have done a bank vault proud, secured by a series of massive, high-tech locks. The entire body of the vehicle was composed of nonferrous ceramic composites, both lighter and significantly stronger than any metal this side of pure adamantium. Magneto cocked an eyebrow at the inventiveness of the design, reminded of a piece of information gleaned by Mystique some while back, that there was a mutant inventor working for DARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research and Planning Agency, known only by the code name Forge. If this was Forge’s work, that made him—or her—a force to be reckoned with, on a par with Xavier himself.

He brought his thoughts back to the business. He couldn’t affect the fabric of the truck directly, and suspected that the armored shell would withstand any modification he might make to the escort vehicles—which
were
made of steel—to use them to breach the walls. He permitted himself a smile. Did they truly think him such a simpleton? Did they think that in the decades his powers had been active he hadn’t devoted a substantial portion of his life to researching all there was to know about the nature and properties of magnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of Creation itself?