Broken Ground - X-Force, Friday morning

[xp_daytripper]

In Arizona, the X-Force gang meets up to compare notes. It's a depressing situation - no-one knows anything and worse, no-one cares - and they're about to conclude things are a bust when something happens to change all that.




Amanda yawned as she pushed open the door of the small gas station, heading for the picnic tables situated off to one side. In one hand was clutched a paper cup of truly nasty coffee (needs must after a night of research) and in the other a pack of cigarettes. Not exactly the five-star breakfast, but what could you do. Perching on one end of the picnic table, she glanced around her co-workers. No-one seemed particularly optimistic this morning.

"So, anyone find anything interesting?" she asked, setting her coffee down so she could open her cigarettes.

"Oh, nothing much," Wanda responded, sounding only a little bitter as her voice came from slightly below everyone else. She lay stretched out on a bench for one of the picnic tables, long legs hanging off the end of it. An arm covered her eyes and she didn't bother to move it as she continued. "I relearned the very important lesson that many people, simply and honestly, do not give a flying leap about each other. The local authorities know and have made a cursory look into the events but beyond that? In their eyes, the people that have gone missing are replaceable and do not warrant large amounts of effort on their part."

Sofia was only slightly more dignified in her pose, weaving the wildflowers by her ankles into a slightly lopsided cornflower wreath. "How do you say, Douglas? Rocks fall, everyone dies? Yes. Rocks fall. Everyone dies."

"Yes, exactly like that," Doug said in response as he slouched backwards on the bench, his head resting on the table. "The migrant workers are being seriously close-lipped. Something's got them spooked, and pretty badly at that."

"Next time we do this, can we pick somewhere tropical?" Sarah's chin was cradled in the palm of one of her hands, her other fingers tapping rhythmically against the table in front of her. "That way when we decide that all we can safely conclude is that there were military people here some time ago and they did stuff, we're at least at the beach or something."

"And there would be bikinis!" Wanda's hand shot up on the other side of the table for a second. "I think a brown and white stripped one would look darling on Doug."

Amanda grinned at Wanda. "I second that. But for some reason, the bad guys like the arse end of nowhere for their plotting. If there's bad guys - right now, all we've got is some old Cold War-era military stuff." She tilted her head at Mark. "Any word from the locals that don't wear uniforms or suits?"

"They know nothing," responded Mark, who was perched on the table by Wanda's bench. "Askin' a bunch of white kids about the fates of some Mexicans isn't going to be much of a fruitful search."

"I think that if one more local police officer asks me one more time why such a pretty girl is worrying so much about illegal immigrants, I may scream." Marie-Ange said irritably. "They either do not know anything and do not care, or know something, but do not care. I suspect the former, as even when I flirted, they could not tell me anything." She didn't bother to look up from the shadow of her ballcap, or lower her sunglasses. "Perhaps apathy is just contagious here."

"With the way some honkies talk 'round here, I keep half-expecting to see Minutemen patrolling the streets," Mark spat. Literally. "I'm so tired of white people always fuckin' . . ." He cut off mid-sentence, his mouth still open, and gripped the table beneath him. "Uh, anyone else feel that quaky earthy thing?"

"You're just imagining things," was Sarah's automatic response, but a quick glance around proved otherwise. Not to mention you could feel it. "Earthquake?"

"Maybe?" Amanda begun, involuntarily grabbing the edge of the table she was sitting on. They didn't get earthquakes where she was from. "What do we..."

The question was interrupted by the ground breaking open in at least half a dozen places, sudden mounds erupting into showers of dirt. And from out of those mounds squirmed bright red shapes, long and glistening, yellow substance dripping from the toothy maws that were the only feature of their 'heads'. Several began humping their way towards the gas station and the owner inside, while the rest focussed on the group now marooned at the picnic tables.

"What the bloody fuck are these things?" Amanda yelped, instinctively pulling her legs up so she was sitting on the table. "No-one said anything about giant worms!"

"Less speculation on where the giant worms came from, and more killing them!" Doug called out, looking around for something that could be used as a weapon. The saliva dripping from the worms' mouths didn't look appetizing. Or like it was something that any of them wanted anywhere near them. Grabbing a pushbroom that one of the gas station attendants had left lying around, he began to wield it in an attempt to fend off the onslaught.

Marie-Ange quickly climbed up onto the picnic table, and dug into her pockets for her deck of cards. "I think I liked not knowing better." Which was not entirely true, but the worm things were utterly disgusting. And of course, her first few cards were nothing useful, and the sword or staff from her tattoo would mean getting close to those things.

Mark's hand went straight to his pocket to withdraw the ever-present iPod as he jumped off the bench. He quickly plugged his ears with the buds with one hand while the other spun the wheel to open a playlist. A second later, he was armored in his exoskeleton. "I really hope this thing is saliva-proof," he muttered idly.

One of the benches went flying sideways as Wanda scrambled up from underneath. She and the thing she'd been laying on had been knocked over from some of the vibrations and now she was making sure she got up and off the ground. "I refuse to get eaten by giant worms. Of all the embarrassing and unseemly ways to die..." A gesture sent a hex bolt flying, destroying one of the mounds that had appeared and sucking a worm back into the dirt.

The response was unexpected, to say the least - electricity arced up from the hole wildly, striking the bench that Wanda had knocked over and leaving a charred hole. The group responded immediately, training coming into play.

'Bloody butt-fuck country town with no juice to speak of,' Amanda cursed inwardly. She was going to be next to useless in this sort of fight without a decent power source, but she clapped her hands together any way, figuring the attempt wouldn't hurt. To her surprise the shielding spell appeared, encompassing all those remaining on the bench, the effort the slightest tug on her powers. "Well, bugger me..." She wasn't about to argue with a sudden power boost, however.

"This is vile." Mark jumped on one of the holes, but the worm inside had burrowed deeper and reappeared a few feet away. Mark tried to stomp on that, but it disappeared again. It was like a giant, disgusting, deadly game of whack-a-mole, and he hated carnival games.

Inside Amanda's shield, there wasn't much Marie-Ange could do except try not to squirm, and watch Mark stomping around. His antics nearly made Marie-Ange laugh, and reminded her of watching Doug and Jamie play video games a long time before. It took only another second for her to realize that Doug was wearing one of the t-shirts from those video games, with an icon of the mustachioed Mario Mario inside a giant boot, stomping on the head of a mushroom.

"I think I saw this movie on an airplane once. It had Kevin Bacon in it!" The image of the Italian plumber in the shoe appeared outside the shield, hopping under its own volition onto one of the slower-moving worms.

"It's-a me, Mario!" Doug called gleefully in response to Marie-Ange's image hopping around busily bopping the worms. While the image ranged about, Doug stayed close to the outer edge of the shield, prepared to dart through one of the occasional holes that appeared in Amanda's shield if the worms became too numerous. Wielding the pushbroom adroitly, he swung it like a golf club, launching a worm that was getting to close to a hole off into a wall. "She will have long blonde hair, bright green eyes..." he muttered under his breath.

Sarah figured she needed to keep out of direct contact, seeing as how she'd never tried being electrocuted before. But the shield kept her bone knives in, while keeping the worms out, so the first hole she saw in the shield, Sarah pushed her way through. There was a worm waiting on the other side, and Sarah's first couple of attempts to hit it with the knives failed miserably. It always burrowed back down before the knife got to it. Moving closer, she managed to drive the sharp end of a bone knife into the middle of it, and the worm lashed back, jaws closing down onto her upper arm before making a hasty retreat down into its hole.

Sarah stood there for a moment, shocked, and a little dizzy. "The fucking thing bit me!"

As the younger woman made her way back to the group and the force field, Wanda concentrated behind Sarah on the ground. Throwing a hex bolt again was out due to the shield--the last time that had happened, someone had shunted to another dimension--but if she could figure out what strings were attached to what...

The ground shimmied slightly as the creature tried to follow and Wanda honed in on it. The rapid use of power sounded like the tunnel kept collapsing, the worm having to burrow through more dirt and not a pre-made tunnel, slowing it down. "How many are there, can we tell?" she called out.

"It's hard to say with some of them being underground," Doug replied. "But I think we're thinning them out, at least." He took a moment to grimace at the slime that was beginning to cover his shirt from his efforts at keeping the worms away. It didn't appear to be the venom that the worm had gotten to Sarah with, but it was still extremely disgusting.

"I fuckin' give up," Mark announced, jumping back onto one of the still-upright tables and dispelling the armor. A quick playlist change later and his fists were glowing the bright, electric purple that signified Hendrix. "'Ooh, foxy lady,'" and sang softly, his voice drowned under the sounds of zapped worms either exploding or burrowing away.

Remy was driving quickly down the highway, wondering whether or not the rest of them had turned up anything. The records at the municipal building had confirmed at least part of his idea. The real problem was that he had all the little pieces of the puzzle but didn't know what the picture was supposed to be.

With his musing, only luck save him as the creature erupted from the dirt parking lot out front of the gas station. It was a worm. A giant worm. And it just happened to be sparking.

"I hate my life." Remy muttered as he pulled open the door and tossed himself out. The car shot past, the little hybrid slamming into the creature. It roiled, muscles jerking like a whipcrack at the impact before it turned and dove back into the ground. There was the hiss of steam from the ruined radiator, and the occasional ping as the hybrid engine died in the lot. Remy got to his feet, brushing the dirt from his coat.

"See, Wanda. If you had let me rent de SUV, dat thing would have been dead. Now, anyone got any idea what de fuck dat thing actually was?"

A chorus of "Giant worm!" "Ugly giant worm!" "Gross and ugly giant worm!" was the answer, amidst the squishy wet noises of the worms being stabbed, swatted, squashed and lasered to death.

"Remy seriously does not... from fucking beneath it devours." He reached into his jacket for his cards, but the gas station parking lot had gone quiet, save for the odd pings from the dying car and the slightly ragged breathing. Nine disgusting corpses lay in the midst of them, squelching and dripping from the damage his team had rained on them. He would have been proud except for the fact that at least one of them got away, and, frankly, it was really disgusting to be standing in. "Guess now we know what was happening to de workers."

A soft hand clap broke the silence, Amanda's shield winking out as the witch climbed off the table, nose wrinkling at the mess. "Guess we do. What now?"

"I swear if anyone says 'I guess it's time to exterminate', I will personally cover you in the slime that is creeping up my very good boots." Grimacing, Wanda scraped her shoe off against the ground and sighed when it was simply covered in dirt. "Bad exterminating jokes aside, at the very least we have a new lead. Slimy, lightening filled lead but anything was better than the nothing we had before."

"We follow it." Remy said, toeing the edge of one of the burrow holes before finding the only right-side up table in the lot. He pulled a tube of rolled paper from his back pocket, and carefully unrolled it, using stones to hold the edges flat. "Wit' de weird sayings, Remy thought dat it might be some kind of mutant or something, using tunnels or burrowing. De workers dat disappeared? Most of dem worked here, at de sorgham fields."

Remy's finger traced a line on the tracing of the local map. He then pointed to a series of red circles on the road running to the west. "Dose are potholes and minor sinkages repaired by de municipal authorities in de last month, 'bout when all dis happened. See it yet?" When he was met with blank looks, Remy pulled a second map out, a geological detail map, and set his tracing over top. "De road sits at de edge of a massive ridge of bedrock. Doesn't break until de highway. De town sits right at de far edge. But de sorgham fields? Dey part of dis vast alluvial plain dat spreads out down from de ridge. Anything underground gets too close to de highway, and de vibrations drive it back. It can only skirt de edges of de roads, causing de potholes as it tries to get close to de surface. Town is a long way off, so de only real feeding ground is de fields."

"Dis is de very unfun part." Remy said, as he pointed to a warren of underground caves that dotted the north edge of the map. "Dis is de only area dat provides shelter underground and has de fields between it and de town. According to de map, a strip of area leading to it was leveled at some point in de late 40s. Think dat we might be looking at something dat people wanted to keep secret?"