Resurrection Man
Mar. 18th, 2008 05:08 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsAfter a worrying phone conversation, a group is dispatched to Kansas to pick up a newly manifested mutant. Sometimes, though, help comes too late.
Sometimes the evidence is waiting for you.
"Do you think there's a season for mutant pick-ups?" Jim asked, scuffing the dirt with his docs. His shoulder hunched in the cold; it had never been easy to conserve bodywarmth without natural insulation. "I think this makes three in a month."
Unbothered by the chill temperatures, Ororo gave a slight shrug as she glanced over at the man next to her. "Perhaps... I am sure that someone with a degree in some sort of statistics would be able to say for sure if there is a correlation. And someone with a degree in mutant studies might have a theory as to why that is. We, however, are not to wonder, merely to do." She gave a small smirk. "As we are."
"At this rate I just want to leave in the same shape we arrive. And still can't believe that's actually a concern. Either way, I'm kind of glad we left the kids with the jet."
Jim scanned the horizon. It was a flat, depressing grey, and had the kind of sourceless illumination common in winter skies. He guessed the fence they were walking next to enclosed a pasture. There were about a dozen small, four-legged shapes in the distance, apparently engaged in some kind of Brownian motion towards the two strangers. He squinted. "I didn't know people still used donkeys. I guess the Wilsons are pretty old-style."
"Apparently..." Ororo hadn't had much experience with donkeys, or horses for that matter, but in her limited observations she had never seen them move in such a coordinated, purposeful manner. "They seem very friendly... I hope they will not be too upset to learn we have no carrots with us. That is what donkeys eat, is it not?"
"I . . . don't know. There aren't a lot of farms in NYC. Whatever usually ends up in mangers, I guess." Jim freed his hand long enough to rub his nose. There were black shapes on the horizon. It looked like some crows had been disturbed too. "I hope this goes okay. The professor seemed kind of worried about this."
"And Charles knows these things... still, we can hope that all his foreboding will be for naught." It was hard to keep a cheerful, optimistic attitude, however, when a large flock of crows was heading unerringly towards them like an ominous dark cloud. "I... do not think that those birds will be happy to hear we have no birdseed on us, either." Ororo pursed her lips. The crows flew closer. "Though they seem rather intent on checking, all the same."
Jim didn't answer. Something was beginning to feel . . . prickly. Not a spike of emotion, but a sort of all-encompassing weight, like walking into a sauna. Jim stopped, his forehead creasing. Charles had mentioned there seemed to be some kind of energy emission, but this felt psionic. And Jim wasn't the most receptive telepath on the team.
"Hold on a minute," he told Ororo, tentatively opening the smallest chink in his shields, "there's someth--"
It hit like a waterfall, pouring through the chink with a deluge of panic and pain and an almost incomprehensible rush of words:
-OP IT PLEASE STOP STOP STOP N-
Jim jerked back, recoiling inside his shields, and the crows arrived.
They didn't behave as normal birds would, but instead swirled together over the two X-Men before diving down in an attack that was both orchestrated and completely chaotic. Shocked, Ororo felt a sharp beak graze her cheek before she thought to duck, covering her face with her hands as the birds cawed and dove again towards them.
There wasn't much time to register Ororo going down before Jim suddenly found himself struck by something dark and thrashing. His yelp transformed into a snarl of rage as Jack surged to the fore in a burst of telekinesis that hurled the bird across the field. His hand flew to a coldness on his neck; the crow's talons had drawn blood.
With a sweep of his hand Jack telekinetically flung the most persistent birds off Ororo, only to be rewarded with stabs of pain at his back as more crows attacked -- and now he could tell by the size of the shapes hurtling towards them that it wasn't only crows but other birds as well. He stumbled next to Ororo and snapped up a hand, shielding them in a tight bubble as the mass poured down.
"The fuck!" Jack hissed at the frenzied mass of wings and beaks squirming against the field. The dirt was covered with bloodied feathers, with more flying outside. Something stank, thick and almost enough to gag.
"One... second..." Ignoring the sting of the wound on her face, Ororo focused for a moment, casting her thoughts to the skies around them despite the fact that she was huddled on the ground next to Jim - or, by the sounds of things, Jack. After a moment came another rushing sound, not the sound of wings but of wind, which slammed into the mass of birds and sent them tumbling away, though a few at the outskirts of the flock were already regrouping and throwing themselves back at the two victims.
"Are they being driven by some outside force?" the weatherworker asked as she manipulated the winds to swirl the birds further away from them. "What could be causing them to act like this?"
"Something psychic." Jack lurched to his feet, eyes fixed on the dark mass in the sky. "Kid felt it before--"
The fence behind them splintered as half a dozen donkeys forced their way through, lips curled back to expose yellow teeth. Instinctively, Jack sent a blast of telekinesis punching through the forelegs of the nearest one, shattering them. He noticed, dimly, that the animal didn't even scream.
Ororo gasped - the other animals behind the fallen donkey did not veer around the body, merely trampling over it in their desire to get at her and the telekinetic. Bloody footprints littered the ground as they neared, teeth bared and dark eyes gleaming in the low light. "We need to get back to the jet and warn the others," she said quickly, splitting her attention between the donkeys and the birds overhead, which were doing their best to get past the buffering winds and back at them. "Now."
A throwing motion from Jack, and there was a sick snap as one of the animal's heads spun almost 180 degrees. It collapsed in a heap, motionless. "Agreed," he said shortly.
Stomach turning, Ororo glanced at the man beside her, measuring him up as she weighed in her head the possibility of them outrunning the remaining donkeys. And possibly the birds... "I can get us back, if you do not mind what may be something of a bumpy ride..."
"Three trainees with not one distance power says I'll live with it."
---
"Bored now." Jan sighed. "Anyone else bored? I am. I am sooo bored. Bored, bored, bored." Her face brightened. "Ooh! I brought a deck of cards! Anyone want to play?"
"Dude, as long as it's not old people card games." Kyle looked over his shoulder to where Forge was just out of sight. "They make Forge all ... twitchy." He was sitting on the floor, feet propped up on a half-empty MRE box he'd found and looked about as bored as Jan sounded. "Or, we could go explore and not be near "Taking more data" guy and avoid the headache that will totally inevitably happen when he starts trying to explain whatever weird science thing he just found was."
From the other side of the Blackbird, Forge frowned from behind his goggles. "I heard that," he mumbled, trying to make sense of the readings displaying on the glass. "Sphere One-Two-One, relay and confirm last set of data," he commanded, sending the signal to the small sphere he'd sent out to scout the farmhouse. In seconds, rapid-fire digital images flickered across his vision, overlaid by graphs and numbers. "This is weird. There's anomalous energy readings that don't match up with any known EM fields, predicted sunspot activity, tectonic structures, or anything. Why don't you guys take a walk and see if anything looks, I dunno, weird. I'm sure Haller and Ororo are probably selling the school to this kid's parents over cookies and juice or something."
Jan grinned. "There are cookies? I want cookies! Come on Kyle, let's go look for weird stuff. Because, you know, there's not enough weird stuff in New York so we have to go find some more just for us."
Kyle was already getting up, and pushing the box against the wall with one bare foot. "It's gonna be chocolate chip. And then everyone but me gets cookies. I swear, this is what always happens." He said, but with no real malice. "Maybe they'll have some cool farm animals or something. That'd be pretty sweet. Like horses! Hey, Forge! They might have horses!" He said, delibratly pitching the last to be heard as they opened the hatch to the outside.
He was barely outside when he stopped and covered his nose with one hand. "Stinky ass horses. Jesus, what are these people running a pet cemetery or something?"
Hearing Kyle's exhortation, Forge sniffed the air. He couldn't smell anything, but Kyle's feral senses were an entire order of magnitude more acute. "It's a farm," he announced, turning his attention back to the roving sphere's scans, "things stink on a farm. Especially horses." He didn't bother to suppress a shudder. "Go on and bring me back some cookies."
"What are we, the cookie delivery service or something?" Jan walked down the ramp and looked around. "Farm. Yuck!"
Kyle didn't make it down more then a few more steps, most of them taking on momentum. "Something… is totally wrong here." he said, voice dropping slightly. "It..." He pulled his shirt up to cover his mouth, and was trying not to breathe through his nose. "It stinks, and not like horseshit, or any other kind of shit. And it's... " He cocked his head, listening to a rustling noise. "Forge, get out here! Tell me this place sounds crazy to you!" He yelled. "All the goddamn noises are wrong!"
"Dude, we're on a farm, it's probably just animals or something," Forge complained, pushing his goggles up on his forehead and walking out the back hatch of the Blackbird. "I don't smell any... oh god, I do. What is that?" He wrinkled his nose, imagining how the weird sickly sweet smell on the wind must be to Kyle's senses. Something caught his eye in the weeds, and he pulled his goggles back down. "Spheres One-One-Two and One-Two-Two, run cloverleaf scan, ten meters, my location."
The buzzing noise of the small globes shooting overhead was barely audible over the rustling in the weeds as the three trainees peered at the underbrush. Forge leaned forward, trying to decipher the readings his scans were giving him. "Weird. Rabbits, probably. Do rabbits flock in groups?"
"Do rabbits run at people?" Jan asked, moving back, as it seemed that the smelly things, whatever they were, were rapidly approaching their small group.
"No, they totally don't." Kyle said, staring at the rabbits intently. "And they never run towards me. Never." He'd chased enough rabbits to know that. "And they don't hang out with woodchucks or squirrels, either. What. The. Fuck?" he asked, head moving to track the pack of fearless and, as he became more aware, smelly, woodland life. Although Kyle's attention darted from animal to animal, it never left the pack itself as he watched.
Which was why, despite the warning cry from his two teammates, the large slightly bloated goose flying straight for his head went unnoticed until it was too late. The encounter lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for Kyle to get his clawed fingers into the goose and then to throw it against the side of the plane, leaving him stunned, and bleeding from the ear. "What the holy -fuck- is going on?"
Jumping back with a yelp, Forge watched the goose spasm on the ground. Obviously it was wounded, although the gouges that Kyle had left in its body weren't bleeding. Slowly, it raised its head again, hissing at the three trainees.
Forge took a step back, then gulped. "Sphere One-Two-Two," he intoned, "Thermal view, please." He blinked behind his goggles and then looked out at the weeds where more animals - rabbits, squirrels, and groundhogs - were advancing on them.
"They're all registering as having ambient body heat," he announced. "Zero readings for pulmonary or respiratory function. Uh, these are a bunch of dead animals. A bunch of moving dead animals." He gulped loudly, suddenly wishing that he could disbelieve this entire afternoon. "I think we landed on Zombie Farm, dude."
Kyle had figured that out about half a second before Forge did, and grabbed at his ear. "Shit. Shit shit shit. I read that World War Z book, I don't want to turn into a zombie! I gotta do something! I gotta get rid of the place the goose bit me before I turn into the walking dead!" He disappeared into the Blackbird, still holding the side of his face, and did not emerge, although sounds of pain came from the interior of the plane.
Jan almost shrank, but stopped herself just in time. She wasn't in her uniform. If she shrank... Shit. "Forge! The zombie things are going to eat you! Run!" She quickly followed her own advice and ran back into the Blackbird.
It was with a rather ungraceful swirl of wind (and feathers) that Ororo and Haller finally arrived at the spot where the small, furry creatures were converging, though she managed to set them down far enough away that their toes weren't in danger of being gnawed off immediately. There were still birds overhead as well, though by now the weatherworker had lost enough of her temper that each time she 'batted' them away with another gust it was with more and more vigor.
Jack landed with less grace, stumbling as his feet hit the dirt. However, he didn't let that break his momentum. While Ororo sent a blast towards the encroaching jumble of rabbits and mice he regained his balance and, without missing a step, grabbed Forge by the shoulder and kept going until both of them were up the ramp of the Blackbird. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground below the hatch as the headmistress joined them. "Guess you all won't be needing that status report," he commented.
Forge stumbled into the Blackbird, turning to glance from Haller to Ororo, then point frantically out the hatch. "What the hell?" he demanded. "Dude! Just... what the hell?"
"The muh . . ." Jack halted in mid-sentence as Jim pushed back to the fore, the transition manifesting as little more than a brief facial spasm. Jim rubbed his forehead and started again. "The mutant we're here to pick up. He's got some kind of psionic power, but not . . . exactly. It's like his psi-signature is all around us. The animals -- I can actually sense something from them. Him in them." 'Around us' was an understatement, but he kept Cyndi's rather appalling view of the situation to himself.
Eric Wilson: We're soaking in him.
Jan had absolutely no desire to look outside at the dead-yet-mobile animals. "Kyle, how're you doing?" Jan asked her fellow trainee.
Kyle emerged from the back of the plane, pressing a handful of gauze to the side of his head. "It's scabbing over and the bleeding mostly stopped. And I don't feel like a zombie yet, so I think I'm safe." He shook the red biohazard bag that was in his other hand. "Where should I put this? It's pretty gross."
Jim gave the boy an odd look, nonetheless laced with a certain dread. "Um, what is it?"
"Half my ear." Kyle said, all too casually. At the incredulous looks, he added. "What? Dude, how many zombie movies have you seen? You get bit, you turn into a zombie. I got bit on the ear by the zombie goose! It was this or zombieitis and do you really want crazy zombie Kyle? I mean, dudes. I was taking no chances and my ear will grow back!"
Forge just stared incredulously at Kyle, then threw his hands into the air and stomped over to the pilot's chair, strapping himself in. "Zombie geese. Right. Okay, I'm shutting the hatch - orders? Are we getting out of here, calling in backup, what's the deal?" He flipped a set of toggles, hearing the familiar whine and vibration of the Blackbird's VTOL engines coming to life.
"Waiting three hours for backup would be a bad idea," Ororo mused aloud, already dismissing the idea of abandoning the site out of hand. She looked around, tallying the team she had assembled around her. "At the very least, we need to assess the situation and do what we can to contain it - involving anyone from the outside at this point would be a disaster. Without knowing the cause we can do nothing."
She nodded resolutely and turned to Haller. "Which means our first task is to find out the source."
"It's concentrated around . . . that way." Jim pointed towards the direction of the farmhouse. "I can't get an exact fix. Everything I can pick up is homogenized." He opened his eyes, wincing. "I can't even guess at specifics, but I'd estimate that between here and there we're looking at 'a lot'."
Pulling his goggles down over his eyes, Forge pushed the throttle of the Blackbird smoothly forward, lifting the jet off the ground and turning towards the farmhouse. "Okay then," he said in a deadpan voice. "In we go."
---
"Pigs. Those are zombie pigs," Forge intoned, looking at the veritable sea of slowly-decomposing yet still mobile swineflesh in between the Blackbird and the farmhouse. These were not the cute, adorable little pink pigs that starred in children's movies, or the tiny little miniature pigs like Laurie's pet. No, these were six hundred pound farm pigs, currently animated by some unknown force in some state between alive and deceased.
Looking to Haller and Ororo for guidance and finding none, Forge simply shrugged and lifted the Blackbird a bit higher off the ground and made some subtle adjustments to the throttle output. "Okay then," he said offhandedly as he toggled another switch and redirected the nose of the Blackbird in a slow rising arc. "They're bacon."
With a roar of the VTOL jets, Forge piloted the Blackbird forward, the superheated air from the maneuvering thrusters acting like a battering ram through the herd of undead pigs, in some cases blasting decaying flesh right off the bones.
A mixture of bats and birds were ricochetting off the windshield like thrown pebbles. Jim winced as a particularly large bat made an impact right in front of his face, shedding little clumps of fur into the wind. The telepath glanced over at Forge. "You know, as glad as I am we're not walking, I'm a little disturbed you just happened to have 'Ride of the Valkyries' sitting around."
Showing his teeth in an almost manic grin, Forge tapped his iPod where it was velcroed to the instrument panel and plugged into the Blackbird's external speaker system. "Never let it be said that I don't appreciate the classics. Besides, if these things are really zombies, then it stands to reason that the delicate tissues are going to degrade first, right? That means that sight and smell won't be of much use to them, and blasting Wagner at one hundred ten decibels should negate whatever sense of hearing they've got."
As he spoke, he jerked the yoke to the left, gunning the jet's thrusters slightly to carve an arc through the front yard of the farmhouse, using the flame from the thrusters like a snowshovel. Checking the landing cameras, he slowly lowered the Blackbird to the singed grass. "And we are clear for the time being. Anyone want to inform Van Gogh back there that he's not going to catch the zombie-itis before he starts removing any more appendages?"
Jim coughed. He was realizing it would have been a surprise if anything else could be raised. The entire farm felt like a bottle full of water and silt that had been shaken. Whatever initial force had torn through the farm, it now felt like it was . . . settling. "Um, yeah. Kyle, about that -- I think if whatever psionic influence is supporting these things was passed physically I'd have it already--" he indicated his own bloodied neck, "--so, uh . . . don't cut anything else off, please."
"Yep, no more removing body parts!" Jan said. "That's kind of gross, and we already have plenty of gross out there!" Indicating the front of the aircraft, Jan made a face.
"Well no one told me!" Kyle was still holding a wad of gauze to the side of his head. "Also, the crazy Nazi opera music is negating what sense of hearing I HAVE GOT!" He said, raising his voice to match the music. "Now what? Where's this kid we were supposed to get? This is totally going all Resident Evil and I would like to get the hell away before I get any more things on my list of stuff I can't eat. Like cows."
"Deep breaths, Kyle." Jim pointed towards the farmhouse, now mercifully close. "He's in there . . . somewhere. Can't get an exact bead."
"We are going to have to get through whatever is waiting for us out there before we can find out his location - now is not the time to be squeamish." Going on, Ororo outlined a plan to get inside the farmhouse and locate the young mutant, covering her sensible blouse with a leather jacket that would hopefully prove more donkey-proof.
As soon as the ramp hit the ground, the two X-Men and three trainees bolted out onto the lawn, heading for the farmhouse. Forge took a few awkward hops, folding his prosthetic leg into a different configuration on the fly and bounding for the front steps. An attempt to hurdle a slow-moving goat, however, sent him tumbling head-over-heels and rolling towards the porch. "I'm okay!" he hollered as he scrambled to his feet, swinging the long-handled wrench wildly to clear himself a path to the door. One quick swing of the wrench and the farmhouse's door crashed inwards on its hinges. "And we're in!"
Acceptable damages, acceptable damages, acceptable damages . . . Hearing the telltale howl of wind that indicated Ororo had their backs, Jim paused to kick a mangy cat out of his way. Even though Davey was nowhere near the front he couldn't help but think it was a good thing he hadn't been raised in a religion where Hell featured as a potential destination. He scrambled up the front steps and halted near the threshold. "Jan! Watch out!"
Jan's reaction at Haller's 'Watch out!' was instantaneous. Automatically, as she had done that day just a year ago when she had been camping with her friends, she shrank to a one-inch size. As had happened then, her clothes fell to the floor. "Fuck!" exclaimed tiny Jan in her tiny voice. As this wasn't supposed to be a mission and she hadn't planned on shrinking, her voice amplifier was not with her.
Had Kyle not been busy dealing with the zombie goat, which had ignored Forge's leg in favor of the taller, fleshier non-metal person steps behind him, he'd have dealt with the zombie mutt bounding towards the space where normal sized Jan was now teeny-tiny Jan. The double-armful of rotting goat prevented him from doing anything except throwing the goat against the ramp and watching in horror as it tried to pull itself back up on broken limbs.
"Enough!" Ororo told him, at the tail end of the group and focused on the main objective of getting inside the house. "Keep going!" She watched the remaining trainees made their way through the door and then ran for it herself, aiming a kick at the half-mobile goat that landed with a disgusting squish but failed to kill it once again.
As Jan zipped in Jim shoved the door shut. It was still badly bent on its hinges. He braced himself against the door, grimacing as he felt something sticky under one foot. He grit his teeth, muttering, "Dammit, where the hell do they get all those boards and nails in the movies?"
"From the props department," Ororo muttered, putting her shoulder to the tall china hutch next to the door and shoving at it. "Use the furniture."
"Kyle!" Forge shouted as he wandered into another room. "Give me a hand pushing this couch against the door and..." His voice trailed off as he noticed something in a nearby cabinet. The others could hear a brief sound of breaking glass, then a repeated ratcheting noise before Forge reappeared in the main room, carrying a lever-action shotgun over one shoulder.
"God bless the Second Amendment," he quipped, walking for one of the windows.
"Holy shit! Shotgun!" Kyle said, shoulder already into the sofa, moving it steadily towards the door. "Might wanna get on top as I push it in." He said to Jim, with a mental addendum of "Man, codenames, no codenames, I guess the zombies won't care.". "I don't wanna let any zombie livestock in between you moving and sofa shoving. That'd be like, counter productive or something. "
"Thanks, I don't grow back as well." Jim quickly stepped aside to let the boy through. Jan seemed disinclined to return to normal size -- he could hear her wings whirring overhead. His foot slid on something soft, and he looked down to see what he'd stepped on. It was a small brown mouse, apparently dead in the permanent sense. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another one lying by the wall, also motionless. Hey . . .
Then a hoof crashed through a window.
Whipping around to the window, Forge narrowed his eyes behind the goggles at the large horse, struggling its way through one of the large windows, its front legs tangled in the screen. With almost casual precision, he raised the shotgun one-handed -
lever action twelve gauge lead pellet shot full choke two point five inch dispersal pattern at two meter range
-and fired, the blast obliterating the front half of the animal's head, sending a spray of rotting cerebral tissue out the window. Without a word, Forge cocked the shotgun again, walking over to the remains and placing one foot against the horse's withers, shoving it back from the now-shattered window. As he heard the sound of more hoofbeats approaching, he smoothly raised the firearm to his shoulder, taking up a position at the windowsill. "Go for the brainstem," he said in a flat monotone.
"Someone thinks I paid attention in biology, doesn't he?" Jan muttered. If she was going to keep this up, she really needed more anatomy lessons when this was all over; her two unplanned trips into human bodies hadn't taught her much other than "ew!"
"If you shoot me, I will come back and haunt you!" Jan warned Forge as she made a beeline towards a dead-yet-alive bay mare. ~Hey! Tell Forge I'm gonna haunt him if he shoots me dead!~ Jan thought at Haller, not sure whether or not he would 'hear' her but not particularly caring at the moment.
"Watch out for Jan," Jim relayed. Concentration was becoming increasingly difficult; torn between searching for the source of the disturbance and reacting to the impending physical threat, it was all he could do to keep Jack from surfacing. To buy himself time, Jim drove one foot hard into the leg of an end-table to snap off a leg; he was less likely to switch with an alternative means of defense.
Making a face, Jan held out her hands and started zapping, beginning with the horse's neck. Whether she hit the right spot or the repeated and intensifying zaps did it she didn't know, but the horse dropped to the ground. Rather pleased with herself, she turned around and shrieked as she was attacked by a should-be-really-dead chicken.
"Are you kidding me?" she yelled to no one in particular as she zapped the foul fowl into what she hoped was a permanent death.
"Guys! Stench on our six!" Kyle yelled, diving and then snagging what looked to be a zombified barn cat out of mid-leap. "What the -fark-. I mean, seriously. We've got stuff coming in the back way too. We're surrounded." The cat's corpse was struggling in his grip - Kyle hesitated long enough to earn himself several ugly scratches, and then he tightened his grip, claws digging in, and the body went still. "Brainstem. Right." He confirmed, in a flat tone of voice.
Ororo had been so distracted by keeping tabs on the others - not that they weren't dealing admirably with the threat, but zombie animals had not been on the Danger Room training roster - that she neglected to notice an angry chicken that had managed to flap its way through one of the broken windows. It wasn't until she felt the sharp stinging sensation in her lower leg that she realized what was happening, and reacted automatically, planting her foot and pivoting to kick the bird away. The kick connected with the chicken's head and bent it backwards, which didn't stop it from running towards her again, colliding with her leg and flailing about in a way that would have been comical if it wasn't horrifying.
"Shit," Jim breathed, almost stumbling back into Forge as a dog missing half the skin on its muzzle darted towards him. He brought the tableleg down hard on its skull, staggering it, and then again to the side of its face. There was a crack -- one from splintering wood, and one of snapping vertebrae. Jim could feel his pulse in his ears as the carcass collapsed.
And then, down the second-floor stairs, came something far worse.
Moving more slowly than the animals and clenching their hands around the bannister by some kind of residual sense of self-preservation, a man and woman were descending. Their skin was blotchy with grey, their clothing stained in places by dark fluid. They moved like people in a dream, slow and purposeful.
The woman misstepped halfway down; she fell as bonelessly as a doll, and for a moment lay still at the bottom. The corpse of her husband proceeded after her, not even changing step. The tread of workboots on the wood pounded like a heartbeat. At the base of the stairs the woman began to grope her way to her feet.
Turning, Forge sighted down the barrel of the shotgun, then stopped. His hands shook, and he lowered the weapon, thumbing the safety on. "Those are people," he said in a wavering voice. "Those are... dead... people. And they're moving."
"Oh shit..." Kyle breathed. He froze, back against the wall, unwilling to approach the pair, and unable to retreat. "Oh shit, oh shit." He repeated, shaking his head slowly. He looked over his shoulder towards Jim, and then at Ororo, eyes wide with fear, and for once, shocked into silence.
That was enough.
He'd never used a shotgun, but he had Forge's example. Without a word, Jim took the gun from the younger man and stepped forward. Pull the lever down, then back up. Feel the round slide into the chamber. The rest were those things he had never forgotten: breathe, and sight, and squeeze the trigger.
The shots seemed very loud. The woman's face disintegrated in a shower of red, snapping her head back and dragging the rest of her body with it. Behind her the man had reached the ground floor. Face as slack as a stroke-victim's, the corpse started towards Kyle.
Ejecting the shells, Jim levered the hammer back again and realized he had nothing to reload. His head snapped towards Ororo, and paragraphs of meaning were packed into one word.
"Storm."
It wasn't easy, gathering that much energy and focusing it to avoid hitting any of the other (real, living) bodies in the room. On the other hand, it was surprisingly simple to direct the ball of lightning towards the man, stepping back to watch as it hovered slowly towards him, then enveloped him in its field.
The corpse went rigid and dropped to the ground, then twitched violently for a moment before again going still.
Jan stared at the unmoving bodies, nearly dropping out of the air in shock. Seeing the people moving had been pretty bad, but seeing them unmoving, like this, wasn't really any better.
It was the briefest of respites, but in the silence after the bodies dropped Ororo made a quick decision, having already sized up the small house and all possible entry points as they had fought off the first wave of zombified animals.
"We need to put an end to this." No telling how far the effect could stretch if they didn't. "Jan, Forge, stay here and watch this door. Kyle, you and I will cover the kitchen door. Haller..." She gave the slightest twitch of her shoulders, raising her chin towards the stairs. "Find Eric."
Their eyes locked for a moment, and then he nodded. There was no choice. It was clean up the mess, or stop the bleeding. Jim pushed the shotgun back into Forge's hands, spared himself a split-second to orient, and disappeared up the stairs.
---
Forge absently reloaded the shotgun, one pocket of his flight suit bulging with shells. Animated animal corpses were one thing, dead humans getting up and walking around was another. As far as his mind was concerned, that fell squarely in the Things That Should Not Be category, and thus was shoved into a back corner to deal with later. Possibly with a lot of twitching and screaming.
For the moment, though, he had to hold the line. Calling up another scan report from his spheres, still orbiting the farmhouse, he frowned. "Jan," he called to his miniscule teammate, "can you see anything?"
"Yep!" Jan replied cheerfully. "I see someone who can't hear me! I can say anything I want and you don't know what I'm saying! You won't know if I didn't hear you or what! Admit it, you just want me to get bigger so you can see me!"
Cocking his head, Forge tried to interpret what to his hearing was barely audible buzzing. "Crap, you don't have your amplifier," he mused. Or her uniform, he reminded himself, trying not to look directly at the tiny flying girl. "Okay, um... go around the corner, zap anything you see, and try and get it to chase you past the window. I won't fire until you're past me, okay?"
"Do zombie things pay any attention to insects?" Jan wondered, doubling her size to two inches as she followed Forge's instructions.
Jan's question was answered quickly, as a pair of sheep began awkwardly loping after her, matted hair clotted with fluids too foul to mention as they followed Jan around the lawn and back towards the shattered window. As soon as she zipped past Forge's head, he raised the shotgun to his shoulder, firing once, slapping the cocking lever down and up, then again. Two shots, two more undead animals added to the slowly-growing menagerie littering the lawn.
"Ew. OK, seriously, can't we just have maybe an end to this dead this that aren't?" Jan rolled her eyes as she caught sight of a few zombie birds in the air. "Fine. Avada Kedavra!" Jan raced towards the birds, hands held out and ready to zap... and then the nasty things just fell out of the sky and dropped down the ground with a sickening sound. "OK... ew!"
Arching an eyebrow behind his goggles, Forge paused and lowered the barrel of the shotgun. "Spheres one two one and one two two, perimeter scan. Report mobile masses under five kilograms. Execute."
The two silver globes buzzed around the farmhouse, relaying images of smaller animals - mice, birds, and rabbits, just slowly stopping and keeling over onto the ground.
Forge shrugged, keeping up his vigil. "Now that's just weird," he proclaimed.
"Yep, that's just weird," Jan agreed. Forgetting her current lack of clothing, she grew to her full size, careful not to touch any of the dead-and-hopefully-actually-dead animals. "Really, really weird."
Gritting his teeth and restraining the urge to look over his shoulder, Forge carefully wriggled out of his jacket and handed it back to Jan. "Here you go," he said as he kept his attention focused on the lawn. "I don't think there's much still moving out there," he reported, pitching his voice to carry through the house to his other team members. "Anyone else got anything?"
---
There were drying stains on the floor. The boxes in the attic looked like they might once have been set up in a kind of intentional maze, but some had been pushed over or shoved aside. Jim awkwardly picked through the mess, half-stooping to keep his head from banging on the rafters. Along with the dust, the room smelled like an electrical burn.
He'd seen the ladder hanging down on the second floor. The farm was a soup of undifferentiated psionic chaos, but Jim could make out one thing: fear. Eric's terror was the driving force, and when you were afraid the instinct was to go to a place you felt safe. In his gut, he knew this was Eric's.
Behind the stacks of boxes an area had been cleared. The floor was covered with handmade objects: skeletal buildings, wireframe models of humans and animals, geometric shapes; a foot-long truss bridge sat next to a hand-sized log cabin, while inside a simplistic corral ostriches strutted alongside horses, cows and goats. Off to the side a brontosaurus with a neck made of a single twisted stick writhed in combat with a tyrannosaurus.
Twigs and sticks, shoe laces, sewing thread, dirty yarn, scraps of rag, twist-ties. The entire area was filled with constructions of amazing delicacy, all twisted together out of junk and salvage into a world of its own. A half-finished geodesic dome sat next to a pile of delicate triangles, a ruler and a rusting x-acto knife nearby.
And in the corner, a body.
It was almost impossible to guess what it had looked like before. The flesh was charred and split, like a burn victim; all that could be distinguished now was that it had been short, and a little husky. A few tufts of brown hair still clung to the scalp. The eyes were white and clouded.
Carefully stepping around the fragile models, Jim approached. He knelt down beside the boy to touch his blackened hand as he locked gaze with the blind eyes. To the presence imbuing the farm, but specifically this attic, the telepath sent:
#Hello, Eric. I'm Jim.#
The boy was past the point of words, but a jumble of images and impressions supplied the reply. Walking into the house to the sound of the phone slamming, and his father coming up with that familiar look on his face that made his mother leave the room without a word. The first close-fisted blow, and the next, and the next.
Then the pain.
Jim had enough experience to keep his feelings out of their contact, but he couldn't stop himself from squeezing his eyes shut. Charles had been right in his concern. The father -- the lethal mutation -- it had been too late for Eric from the moment the phonecall had ended.
Exhaling, the telepath opened his eyes again. Smoothing his mind into calm reassurance, he squeezed the cracking flesh.
#Listen, Eric, it's okay. It wasn't your fault.# Diffusing his own mind, Jim reached out across the farm to envelope what was left of the boy. #We're not here to hurt you. Just relax. You're safe.# The contact hurt. Eric was still tied to flesh -- his own, and the ones killed in the eruption of his power. The corpses were all moving on borrowed energy, and Eric was running dry.
Inhale, exhale. Muting the pain as much as he could, Jim put both hands over Eric's hand and said the words he knew the boy needed to hear.
#It's okay to let go now.#
There was no rushing this, no hurry. When what he had known would happen finally began, the telepath just closed his eyes and let it come.
In his room upstairs, listening for how the door, the barometer of his father's mood, would close. Praying that it would be soft so he could come down for dinner, chest tightening with fear that it would be hard enough he'd want to spend the rest of the night in the attic.
The day after learning to make god's eyes in elementary school, picking up every twig, loose string and piece of shoelace just in case. The other kids watching and whispering that he had no real toys, and this time not caring. He had a Plan.
The day before Easter Sunday dyeing eggs with his mother for the church egg hunt, his mother instructing him on how to turn each egg and lower it only halfway to create something two-colored, or three, or four. Face still aching from the thrashing of dropping half the morning's lay, he breathed in the vinegary smell of the dye and dipped.
How much it had hurt to breathe for weeks after his father had let him have it for forgetting the pasture gate and letting three of the horses lose. The only time his father had ever stomped him instead of using his hands or the piece of hose always hanging on a hook on the kitchen door.
The day last summer picking ticks off one of the dogs. How they were so swollen all he had to do was reach into the grimy fur and wiggle them until they came free. Throwing them against the barn wall so hard they spattered like water balloons.
The trip to an orchard almost a decade ago, his father lifting him up on his shoulders so he could pick the highest apples. Tension of the branch, pulling an apple until it bowed. His father, holding the cloth sack between his teeth, reaching up and breaking the stem for him. Passing the apple down for his father to take. And his father, moving them to the next tree, each step a bounce for his son.
The day . . .
The day . . .
The day . . .
Rolling over Jim was everything that was Eric Patrick Wilson, aged 14, only child of Robert and Melissa Wilson. As darkness began to close the telepath simply remained beside him, holding his hand.
Waiting for the end.
---
Ororo didn't normally have a problem with dead things. As a consummate believer in the cycle of life, she was fully aware of the necessity and even benefits of death, and had come to terms with it some time ago. Dead things that walked, however, and wanted to eat your flesh? Those she had a problem with.
Stationed at a now-open window, the weatherworker was manipulating the air around the house, keeping the worst of the flocks of angry, hungry birds away and scanning the surrounding area for any larger animals that might be approaching. It seemed only a matter of time before they found their way to the house.
Until now, Kyle had never considered the merits of a purely vegetable-based diet. Vegans were weird people, and some of their food smelled funny. Even if Karolina was really nice and cute. But after the fourth or fifth zombie chicken, and the second still-moving corpse of a calf, he was seriously considering it. At least until he could look at a hamburger and not see the face of the undead baby cows.
He'd taken up a position at the half-barricaded back door -anything smaller then a breadbox met its re-demise via claws, or being crushed
between the table they'd pushed against the door and the door itself. Anything that got past that, well, it had just been the one calf, and Kyle was hoping it wouldn't be anything else. Breaking a baby cow's neck was not fun, and not something he ever wanted to repeat again.
Ororo's hair was practically on end with all the electricity waiting for her call - she must have looked a sight, though that was the last thing on her mind right now. "Do you see any more?" she asked, knowing Kyle's vision was sharper than hers in the dusky light.
Kyle went silent and still for a moment - more so then he'd been before, cocking his remaining ear towards the outside grounds. His nose had long since given up - all he could smell was decay and blood and rotting meat in abundance, and while he could see in the dim light, he was reduced to catching movement long before he could identify anything clearly. "I can't see anything, but there's still some noises. Something's thrashing around, but not close. Maybe something stuck in a building or something." Or under the plane. He didn't want think about that.
With a nod, Ororo diverted her attention enough to glance behind at the interior of the cabin; save for the downed corpses there was nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary to indicate that Forge and Jan were having any trouble with their end of the house.
Kyle was more than a little - really, kind of a whole lot disturbed by how easily it had become routine to wait for the sounds of something moving, let it get just inside the door, and kick it in the face or neck until it fell over. Or smash it against the table until it stopped moving. It was a lot like moving the pig carcasses in Vegas, except with more noises, and more horrible smells and more wanting to take a hot shower for the rest of his entire life.
So when the pair of raccoon went limp and fell over before he could even touch them, all he could do was stare for several seconds before slowly putting his foot back on the ground. "Uh. Uh. Storm?" He said, tenatively. "I, uh... they're dead. Dead-er. Something."
Frowning, Ororo turned back to where Kyle stood, eyeing the dead(er) animals with some doubt. "I... you mean you did not do that?"
"Nuh-uh." Kyle grunted, shaking his head. "Didn't even touch 'em.. They just ... made like they were trying to get in and then flopped over." He kept staring at the raccoons on the ground, and then looking up out the door, and then returning his attention to the still unmoving corpses. "Does it seem real quiet to you too?"
She didn't say 'eerily so' but wanted to, instead just nodding and moving to the window to look outside. There were small bodies littered all over the ground, and much further away Ororo thought she could see a half-dozen larger figures approaching the house.
The donkeys. She was not looking forward to this.
As she watched, however, they began to slow, then stagger, and before she could believe it they had fallen to the ground. There was no movement to them after that.
Where Kyle's attention had been switching from the raccoons to the donkeys, now it was firmly on Ororo. "That wasn't you anymore than the raccoons were me, was it?" His eyes twitched over to the door a few times, but his head didn't move, as if he was trying to force himself to stop looking.
"...no." She stared a moment longer at the inert bodies on the ground, as if waiting for them to climb back to their feet and resume their gruesome progress towards the house. When they didn't, she shook her head and started for the stairs, already halfway up them by the time she remembered to give orders. "Stay here. I am going to find out what happened." And hope that it is over, one way or another.
---
She climbed the stairs slowly, the urgency of wanting to learn what had happened mixed with caution. The three trainees downstairs were still on edge, but the threat seemed to have halted, at least for the moment, and Ororo suspected it may have had something to do with Haller's disappearance.
Winding her way through a maze of battered cardboard boxes, the silver-haired woman carefully made her way further into the attic, breath held in anticipation of what she might find. Please, goddess, no more zombies...
But there were only two figures waiting for her at the end of the maze: her teammate, and the twisted, empty shape of Eric Wilson.
The telepath was still crouched in the forest of models, his profile impassive. Though he said nothing, when he finally raised his eyes to her the slow shake of his head was answer enough.
Ororo pressed her lips together, casting her gaze down to the husk of the young man that rested on the floor next to Haller's knees. It was obvious where the drive for the reanimated corpses had come, and why it had ended so suddenly; she hoped that wherever he was, Eric was at peace.
"We should go - it surely will not be long before someone comes to investigate what has happened here," she murmured. Of course, there was little to be said that could explain away the shell-ridden corpses and pulverized remains of the various farm animals both inside and outside the house. If only there was a way of erasing the evidence...
Blinking, the weatherworker glanced back up at Haller, her expression pensive. "There is little here that would lend itself to an explanation to the authorities. It might be best if we were to remove the signs altogether."
Standing now, Jim looked back down at the corpse. It had been a long time since he had thought of the body as anything more than a sort of elaborate glove for the mind, but it didn't seem right just to leave him. Still, there was a cold ball of certainty in his gut that this was something the trainees should not have to see. They'd already seen enough. But Ororo was right; they couldn't leave this for someone to find and plaster across the headlines. An entire life reduced to one lethal accident.
"Yeah," Jim replied, his voice devoid of inflection, "I agree."
There was a replica of a horse made of twigs and wire by his foot. Stooping down, Jim carefully picked up the little toy. It felt more solid than it looked. He slipped it into his coat pocket and turned back to Ororo.
"What do you want to do?"
---
The skies were clear and dark by the time they made it outside; the absence of any light pollution meant that the stars overhead were starkly visible. Everyone's eyes, however, were focused on the tiny farmhouse a few hundred yards in front of them, now still and quiet and devoid of any life, reanimated or not.
Ororo let the silence stretch out for a time. She thought of the young man who had died that day, and his parents, and the many small lives that had also been ended in the unfortunate turn of events. She hoped once more that they had found peace, a peace that obviously had not been present in their lifetimes, and drew in a deep breath of the cold night air.
"Let us begin."
Beside her, Jim nodded. He took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together, feeling the warmth of friction, fingers brushing the scars that marred his right. In that familiar warmth, he let his mind be overtaken by the one that had been waiting just below the surface.
When their eyes opened again it was Cyndi looking out, but for once she said nothing. All her attention was focused on the farmhouse, the sad, dark shapes scattered across the lawn, and the even sadder shapes she knew were insider. The fire waiting inside every one of them hummed against her brain, begging to be released. To be free. The pyrokinetic stretched out her hands, palms out, and let it go.
The glow was gentle at first, but when Ororo's wind found it it began to leap. Big, bigger than Cyndi had ever tried to create, but she had to keep pushing. The birds, the animals -- even from here it smelled like a barbecue mixed with burning hair. The stars were beginning to grow hazy from the smoke. The smell of woodfire mingled as the house caught. Fire crawl up the walls, across the roof. Curtains began to curl in the heat. The corpses. The models. She spun to flame every surface her mind could touch.
Burning it all away.
Though the fire leapt and licked hungrily at the house, it was still slow going. The rafters caught after a time, and the roof began to glow, the entire scene shimmering against the sky like a hellish mirage. Finally the sounds of groaning reached their ears as the timbers weakened, and it was with a loud crack that the beams finally split and buckled, falling in on themselves and burying the interior under a pile of smoldering wreckage.
When the heat touched her face Ororo tipped it back, closing her eyes as she called down the rains. The gentle fall was enough to keep the fire from spreading, and any outcropping patches were treated to a more intense shower until they extinguished.
She didn't know how long it had been when she finally opened her eyes to find the house little more than a smoldering heap, the shapes that had been bodies on the lawn little more than piles of charred ash. The area still felt wrong, but the cleansing properties of the fire and rain had done what they could to rid it of its taint. There wasn't anything left for them here.
"That's enough," she murmured, surprised to find her throat tight and dry. She swallowed and then tried again, turning away from the glowing scene. "That's enough. Let us go."
Cyndi nodded, her body still sticky with sweat from the effort. Even with Ororo's help sustaining something of that intensity had cost her. Exhausting, but it was done.
In deference to Jim, she let him pretend the tears drying on their face were hers.
Sometimes the evidence is waiting for you.
"Do you think there's a season for mutant pick-ups?" Jim asked, scuffing the dirt with his docs. His shoulder hunched in the cold; it had never been easy to conserve bodywarmth without natural insulation. "I think this makes three in a month."
Unbothered by the chill temperatures, Ororo gave a slight shrug as she glanced over at the man next to her. "Perhaps... I am sure that someone with a degree in some sort of statistics would be able to say for sure if there is a correlation. And someone with a degree in mutant studies might have a theory as to why that is. We, however, are not to wonder, merely to do." She gave a small smirk. "As we are."
"At this rate I just want to leave in the same shape we arrive. And still can't believe that's actually a concern. Either way, I'm kind of glad we left the kids with the jet."
Jim scanned the horizon. It was a flat, depressing grey, and had the kind of sourceless illumination common in winter skies. He guessed the fence they were walking next to enclosed a pasture. There were about a dozen small, four-legged shapes in the distance, apparently engaged in some kind of Brownian motion towards the two strangers. He squinted. "I didn't know people still used donkeys. I guess the Wilsons are pretty old-style."
"Apparently..." Ororo hadn't had much experience with donkeys, or horses for that matter, but in her limited observations she had never seen them move in such a coordinated, purposeful manner. "They seem very friendly... I hope they will not be too upset to learn we have no carrots with us. That is what donkeys eat, is it not?"
"I . . . don't know. There aren't a lot of farms in NYC. Whatever usually ends up in mangers, I guess." Jim freed his hand long enough to rub his nose. There were black shapes on the horizon. It looked like some crows had been disturbed too. "I hope this goes okay. The professor seemed kind of worried about this."
"And Charles knows these things... still, we can hope that all his foreboding will be for naught." It was hard to keep a cheerful, optimistic attitude, however, when a large flock of crows was heading unerringly towards them like an ominous dark cloud. "I... do not think that those birds will be happy to hear we have no birdseed on us, either." Ororo pursed her lips. The crows flew closer. "Though they seem rather intent on checking, all the same."
Jim didn't answer. Something was beginning to feel . . . prickly. Not a spike of emotion, but a sort of all-encompassing weight, like walking into a sauna. Jim stopped, his forehead creasing. Charles had mentioned there seemed to be some kind of energy emission, but this felt psionic. And Jim wasn't the most receptive telepath on the team.
"Hold on a minute," he told Ororo, tentatively opening the smallest chink in his shields, "there's someth--"
It hit like a waterfall, pouring through the chink with a deluge of panic and pain and an almost incomprehensible rush of words:
-OP IT PLEASE STOP STOP STOP N-
Jim jerked back, recoiling inside his shields, and the crows arrived.
They didn't behave as normal birds would, but instead swirled together over the two X-Men before diving down in an attack that was both orchestrated and completely chaotic. Shocked, Ororo felt a sharp beak graze her cheek before she thought to duck, covering her face with her hands as the birds cawed and dove again towards them.
There wasn't much time to register Ororo going down before Jim suddenly found himself struck by something dark and thrashing. His yelp transformed into a snarl of rage as Jack surged to the fore in a burst of telekinesis that hurled the bird across the field. His hand flew to a coldness on his neck; the crow's talons had drawn blood.
With a sweep of his hand Jack telekinetically flung the most persistent birds off Ororo, only to be rewarded with stabs of pain at his back as more crows attacked -- and now he could tell by the size of the shapes hurtling towards them that it wasn't only crows but other birds as well. He stumbled next to Ororo and snapped up a hand, shielding them in a tight bubble as the mass poured down.
"The fuck!" Jack hissed at the frenzied mass of wings and beaks squirming against the field. The dirt was covered with bloodied feathers, with more flying outside. Something stank, thick and almost enough to gag.
"One... second..." Ignoring the sting of the wound on her face, Ororo focused for a moment, casting her thoughts to the skies around them despite the fact that she was huddled on the ground next to Jim - or, by the sounds of things, Jack. After a moment came another rushing sound, not the sound of wings but of wind, which slammed into the mass of birds and sent them tumbling away, though a few at the outskirts of the flock were already regrouping and throwing themselves back at the two victims.
"Are they being driven by some outside force?" the weatherworker asked as she manipulated the winds to swirl the birds further away from them. "What could be causing them to act like this?"
"Something psychic." Jack lurched to his feet, eyes fixed on the dark mass in the sky. "Kid felt it before--"
The fence behind them splintered as half a dozen donkeys forced their way through, lips curled back to expose yellow teeth. Instinctively, Jack sent a blast of telekinesis punching through the forelegs of the nearest one, shattering them. He noticed, dimly, that the animal didn't even scream.
Ororo gasped - the other animals behind the fallen donkey did not veer around the body, merely trampling over it in their desire to get at her and the telekinetic. Bloody footprints littered the ground as they neared, teeth bared and dark eyes gleaming in the low light. "We need to get back to the jet and warn the others," she said quickly, splitting her attention between the donkeys and the birds overhead, which were doing their best to get past the buffering winds and back at them. "Now."
A throwing motion from Jack, and there was a sick snap as one of the animal's heads spun almost 180 degrees. It collapsed in a heap, motionless. "Agreed," he said shortly.
Stomach turning, Ororo glanced at the man beside her, measuring him up as she weighed in her head the possibility of them outrunning the remaining donkeys. And possibly the birds... "I can get us back, if you do not mind what may be something of a bumpy ride..."
"Three trainees with not one distance power says I'll live with it."
---
"Bored now." Jan sighed. "Anyone else bored? I am. I am sooo bored. Bored, bored, bored." Her face brightened. "Ooh! I brought a deck of cards! Anyone want to play?"
"Dude, as long as it's not old people card games." Kyle looked over his shoulder to where Forge was just out of sight. "They make Forge all ... twitchy." He was sitting on the floor, feet propped up on a half-empty MRE box he'd found and looked about as bored as Jan sounded. "Or, we could go explore and not be near "Taking more data" guy and avoid the headache that will totally inevitably happen when he starts trying to explain whatever weird science thing he just found was."
From the other side of the Blackbird, Forge frowned from behind his goggles. "I heard that," he mumbled, trying to make sense of the readings displaying on the glass. "Sphere One-Two-One, relay and confirm last set of data," he commanded, sending the signal to the small sphere he'd sent out to scout the farmhouse. In seconds, rapid-fire digital images flickered across his vision, overlaid by graphs and numbers. "This is weird. There's anomalous energy readings that don't match up with any known EM fields, predicted sunspot activity, tectonic structures, or anything. Why don't you guys take a walk and see if anything looks, I dunno, weird. I'm sure Haller and Ororo are probably selling the school to this kid's parents over cookies and juice or something."
Jan grinned. "There are cookies? I want cookies! Come on Kyle, let's go look for weird stuff. Because, you know, there's not enough weird stuff in New York so we have to go find some more just for us."
Kyle was already getting up, and pushing the box against the wall with one bare foot. "It's gonna be chocolate chip. And then everyone but me gets cookies. I swear, this is what always happens." He said, but with no real malice. "Maybe they'll have some cool farm animals or something. That'd be pretty sweet. Like horses! Hey, Forge! They might have horses!" He said, delibratly pitching the last to be heard as they opened the hatch to the outside.
He was barely outside when he stopped and covered his nose with one hand. "Stinky ass horses. Jesus, what are these people running a pet cemetery or something?"
Hearing Kyle's exhortation, Forge sniffed the air. He couldn't smell anything, but Kyle's feral senses were an entire order of magnitude more acute. "It's a farm," he announced, turning his attention back to the roving sphere's scans, "things stink on a farm. Especially horses." He didn't bother to suppress a shudder. "Go on and bring me back some cookies."
"What are we, the cookie delivery service or something?" Jan walked down the ramp and looked around. "Farm. Yuck!"
Kyle didn't make it down more then a few more steps, most of them taking on momentum. "Something… is totally wrong here." he said, voice dropping slightly. "It..." He pulled his shirt up to cover his mouth, and was trying not to breathe through his nose. "It stinks, and not like horseshit, or any other kind of shit. And it's... " He cocked his head, listening to a rustling noise. "Forge, get out here! Tell me this place sounds crazy to you!" He yelled. "All the goddamn noises are wrong!"
"Dude, we're on a farm, it's probably just animals or something," Forge complained, pushing his goggles up on his forehead and walking out the back hatch of the Blackbird. "I don't smell any... oh god, I do. What is that?" He wrinkled his nose, imagining how the weird sickly sweet smell on the wind must be to Kyle's senses. Something caught his eye in the weeds, and he pulled his goggles back down. "Spheres One-One-Two and One-Two-Two, run cloverleaf scan, ten meters, my location."
The buzzing noise of the small globes shooting overhead was barely audible over the rustling in the weeds as the three trainees peered at the underbrush. Forge leaned forward, trying to decipher the readings his scans were giving him. "Weird. Rabbits, probably. Do rabbits flock in groups?"
"Do rabbits run at people?" Jan asked, moving back, as it seemed that the smelly things, whatever they were, were rapidly approaching their small group.
"No, they totally don't." Kyle said, staring at the rabbits intently. "And they never run towards me. Never." He'd chased enough rabbits to know that. "And they don't hang out with woodchucks or squirrels, either. What. The. Fuck?" he asked, head moving to track the pack of fearless and, as he became more aware, smelly, woodland life. Although Kyle's attention darted from animal to animal, it never left the pack itself as he watched.
Which was why, despite the warning cry from his two teammates, the large slightly bloated goose flying straight for his head went unnoticed until it was too late. The encounter lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for Kyle to get his clawed fingers into the goose and then to throw it against the side of the plane, leaving him stunned, and bleeding from the ear. "What the holy -fuck- is going on?"
Jumping back with a yelp, Forge watched the goose spasm on the ground. Obviously it was wounded, although the gouges that Kyle had left in its body weren't bleeding. Slowly, it raised its head again, hissing at the three trainees.
Forge took a step back, then gulped. "Sphere One-Two-Two," he intoned, "Thermal view, please." He blinked behind his goggles and then looked out at the weeds where more animals - rabbits, squirrels, and groundhogs - were advancing on them.
"They're all registering as having ambient body heat," he announced. "Zero readings for pulmonary or respiratory function. Uh, these are a bunch of dead animals. A bunch of moving dead animals." He gulped loudly, suddenly wishing that he could disbelieve this entire afternoon. "I think we landed on Zombie Farm, dude."
Kyle had figured that out about half a second before Forge did, and grabbed at his ear. "Shit. Shit shit shit. I read that World War Z book, I don't want to turn into a zombie! I gotta do something! I gotta get rid of the place the goose bit me before I turn into the walking dead!" He disappeared into the Blackbird, still holding the side of his face, and did not emerge, although sounds of pain came from the interior of the plane.
Jan almost shrank, but stopped herself just in time. She wasn't in her uniform. If she shrank... Shit. "Forge! The zombie things are going to eat you! Run!" She quickly followed her own advice and ran back into the Blackbird.
It was with a rather ungraceful swirl of wind (and feathers) that Ororo and Haller finally arrived at the spot where the small, furry creatures were converging, though she managed to set them down far enough away that their toes weren't in danger of being gnawed off immediately. There were still birds overhead as well, though by now the weatherworker had lost enough of her temper that each time she 'batted' them away with another gust it was with more and more vigor.
Jack landed with less grace, stumbling as his feet hit the dirt. However, he didn't let that break his momentum. While Ororo sent a blast towards the encroaching jumble of rabbits and mice he regained his balance and, without missing a step, grabbed Forge by the shoulder and kept going until both of them were up the ramp of the Blackbird. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground below the hatch as the headmistress joined them. "Guess you all won't be needing that status report," he commented.
Forge stumbled into the Blackbird, turning to glance from Haller to Ororo, then point frantically out the hatch. "What the hell?" he demanded. "Dude! Just... what the hell?"
"The muh . . ." Jack halted in mid-sentence as Jim pushed back to the fore, the transition manifesting as little more than a brief facial spasm. Jim rubbed his forehead and started again. "The mutant we're here to pick up. He's got some kind of psionic power, but not . . . exactly. It's like his psi-signature is all around us. The animals -- I can actually sense something from them. Him in them." 'Around us' was an understatement, but he kept Cyndi's rather appalling view of the situation to himself.
Eric Wilson: We're soaking in him.
Jan had absolutely no desire to look outside at the dead-yet-mobile animals. "Kyle, how're you doing?" Jan asked her fellow trainee.
Kyle emerged from the back of the plane, pressing a handful of gauze to the side of his head. "It's scabbing over and the bleeding mostly stopped. And I don't feel like a zombie yet, so I think I'm safe." He shook the red biohazard bag that was in his other hand. "Where should I put this? It's pretty gross."
Jim gave the boy an odd look, nonetheless laced with a certain dread. "Um, what is it?"
"Half my ear." Kyle said, all too casually. At the incredulous looks, he added. "What? Dude, how many zombie movies have you seen? You get bit, you turn into a zombie. I got bit on the ear by the zombie goose! It was this or zombieitis and do you really want crazy zombie Kyle? I mean, dudes. I was taking no chances and my ear will grow back!"
Forge just stared incredulously at Kyle, then threw his hands into the air and stomped over to the pilot's chair, strapping himself in. "Zombie geese. Right. Okay, I'm shutting the hatch - orders? Are we getting out of here, calling in backup, what's the deal?" He flipped a set of toggles, hearing the familiar whine and vibration of the Blackbird's VTOL engines coming to life.
"Waiting three hours for backup would be a bad idea," Ororo mused aloud, already dismissing the idea of abandoning the site out of hand. She looked around, tallying the team she had assembled around her. "At the very least, we need to assess the situation and do what we can to contain it - involving anyone from the outside at this point would be a disaster. Without knowing the cause we can do nothing."
She nodded resolutely and turned to Haller. "Which means our first task is to find out the source."
"It's concentrated around . . . that way." Jim pointed towards the direction of the farmhouse. "I can't get an exact fix. Everything I can pick up is homogenized." He opened his eyes, wincing. "I can't even guess at specifics, but I'd estimate that between here and there we're looking at 'a lot'."
Pulling his goggles down over his eyes, Forge pushed the throttle of the Blackbird smoothly forward, lifting the jet off the ground and turning towards the farmhouse. "Okay then," he said in a deadpan voice. "In we go."
---
"Pigs. Those are zombie pigs," Forge intoned, looking at the veritable sea of slowly-decomposing yet still mobile swineflesh in between the Blackbird and the farmhouse. These were not the cute, adorable little pink pigs that starred in children's movies, or the tiny little miniature pigs like Laurie's pet. No, these were six hundred pound farm pigs, currently animated by some unknown force in some state between alive and deceased.
Looking to Haller and Ororo for guidance and finding none, Forge simply shrugged and lifted the Blackbird a bit higher off the ground and made some subtle adjustments to the throttle output. "Okay then," he said offhandedly as he toggled another switch and redirected the nose of the Blackbird in a slow rising arc. "They're bacon."
With a roar of the VTOL jets, Forge piloted the Blackbird forward, the superheated air from the maneuvering thrusters acting like a battering ram through the herd of undead pigs, in some cases blasting decaying flesh right off the bones.
A mixture of bats and birds were ricochetting off the windshield like thrown pebbles. Jim winced as a particularly large bat made an impact right in front of his face, shedding little clumps of fur into the wind. The telepath glanced over at Forge. "You know, as glad as I am we're not walking, I'm a little disturbed you just happened to have 'Ride of the Valkyries' sitting around."
Showing his teeth in an almost manic grin, Forge tapped his iPod where it was velcroed to the instrument panel and plugged into the Blackbird's external speaker system. "Never let it be said that I don't appreciate the classics. Besides, if these things are really zombies, then it stands to reason that the delicate tissues are going to degrade first, right? That means that sight and smell won't be of much use to them, and blasting Wagner at one hundred ten decibels should negate whatever sense of hearing they've got."
As he spoke, he jerked the yoke to the left, gunning the jet's thrusters slightly to carve an arc through the front yard of the farmhouse, using the flame from the thrusters like a snowshovel. Checking the landing cameras, he slowly lowered the Blackbird to the singed grass. "And we are clear for the time being. Anyone want to inform Van Gogh back there that he's not going to catch the zombie-itis before he starts removing any more appendages?"
Jim coughed. He was realizing it would have been a surprise if anything else could be raised. The entire farm felt like a bottle full of water and silt that had been shaken. Whatever initial force had torn through the farm, it now felt like it was . . . settling. "Um, yeah. Kyle, about that -- I think if whatever psionic influence is supporting these things was passed physically I'd have it already--" he indicated his own bloodied neck, "--so, uh . . . don't cut anything else off, please."
"Yep, no more removing body parts!" Jan said. "That's kind of gross, and we already have plenty of gross out there!" Indicating the front of the aircraft, Jan made a face.
"Well no one told me!" Kyle was still holding a wad of gauze to the side of his head. "Also, the crazy Nazi opera music is negating what sense of hearing I HAVE GOT!" He said, raising his voice to match the music. "Now what? Where's this kid we were supposed to get? This is totally going all Resident Evil and I would like to get the hell away before I get any more things on my list of stuff I can't eat. Like cows."
"Deep breaths, Kyle." Jim pointed towards the farmhouse, now mercifully close. "He's in there . . . somewhere. Can't get an exact bead."
"We are going to have to get through whatever is waiting for us out there before we can find out his location - now is not the time to be squeamish." Going on, Ororo outlined a plan to get inside the farmhouse and locate the young mutant, covering her sensible blouse with a leather jacket that would hopefully prove more donkey-proof.
As soon as the ramp hit the ground, the two X-Men and three trainees bolted out onto the lawn, heading for the farmhouse. Forge took a few awkward hops, folding his prosthetic leg into a different configuration on the fly and bounding for the front steps. An attempt to hurdle a slow-moving goat, however, sent him tumbling head-over-heels and rolling towards the porch. "I'm okay!" he hollered as he scrambled to his feet, swinging the long-handled wrench wildly to clear himself a path to the door. One quick swing of the wrench and the farmhouse's door crashed inwards on its hinges. "And we're in!"
Acceptable damages, acceptable damages, acceptable damages . . . Hearing the telltale howl of wind that indicated Ororo had their backs, Jim paused to kick a mangy cat out of his way. Even though Davey was nowhere near the front he couldn't help but think it was a good thing he hadn't been raised in a religion where Hell featured as a potential destination. He scrambled up the front steps and halted near the threshold. "Jan! Watch out!"
Jan's reaction at Haller's 'Watch out!' was instantaneous. Automatically, as she had done that day just a year ago when she had been camping with her friends, she shrank to a one-inch size. As had happened then, her clothes fell to the floor. "Fuck!" exclaimed tiny Jan in her tiny voice. As this wasn't supposed to be a mission and she hadn't planned on shrinking, her voice amplifier was not with her.
Had Kyle not been busy dealing with the zombie goat, which had ignored Forge's leg in favor of the taller, fleshier non-metal person steps behind him, he'd have dealt with the zombie mutt bounding towards the space where normal sized Jan was now teeny-tiny Jan. The double-armful of rotting goat prevented him from doing anything except throwing the goat against the ramp and watching in horror as it tried to pull itself back up on broken limbs.
"Enough!" Ororo told him, at the tail end of the group and focused on the main objective of getting inside the house. "Keep going!" She watched the remaining trainees made their way through the door and then ran for it herself, aiming a kick at the half-mobile goat that landed with a disgusting squish but failed to kill it once again.
As Jan zipped in Jim shoved the door shut. It was still badly bent on its hinges. He braced himself against the door, grimacing as he felt something sticky under one foot. He grit his teeth, muttering, "Dammit, where the hell do they get all those boards and nails in the movies?"
"From the props department," Ororo muttered, putting her shoulder to the tall china hutch next to the door and shoving at it. "Use the furniture."
"Kyle!" Forge shouted as he wandered into another room. "Give me a hand pushing this couch against the door and..." His voice trailed off as he noticed something in a nearby cabinet. The others could hear a brief sound of breaking glass, then a repeated ratcheting noise before Forge reappeared in the main room, carrying a lever-action shotgun over one shoulder.
"God bless the Second Amendment," he quipped, walking for one of the windows.
"Holy shit! Shotgun!" Kyle said, shoulder already into the sofa, moving it steadily towards the door. "Might wanna get on top as I push it in." He said to Jim, with a mental addendum of "Man, codenames, no codenames, I guess the zombies won't care.". "I don't wanna let any zombie livestock in between you moving and sofa shoving. That'd be like, counter productive or something. "
"Thanks, I don't grow back as well." Jim quickly stepped aside to let the boy through. Jan seemed disinclined to return to normal size -- he could hear her wings whirring overhead. His foot slid on something soft, and he looked down to see what he'd stepped on. It was a small brown mouse, apparently dead in the permanent sense. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another one lying by the wall, also motionless. Hey . . .
Then a hoof crashed through a window.
Whipping around to the window, Forge narrowed his eyes behind the goggles at the large horse, struggling its way through one of the large windows, its front legs tangled in the screen. With almost casual precision, he raised the shotgun one-handed -
lever action twelve gauge lead pellet shot full choke two point five inch dispersal pattern at two meter range
-and fired, the blast obliterating the front half of the animal's head, sending a spray of rotting cerebral tissue out the window. Without a word, Forge cocked the shotgun again, walking over to the remains and placing one foot against the horse's withers, shoving it back from the now-shattered window. As he heard the sound of more hoofbeats approaching, he smoothly raised the firearm to his shoulder, taking up a position at the windowsill. "Go for the brainstem," he said in a flat monotone.
"Someone thinks I paid attention in biology, doesn't he?" Jan muttered. If she was going to keep this up, she really needed more anatomy lessons when this was all over; her two unplanned trips into human bodies hadn't taught her much other than "ew!"
"If you shoot me, I will come back and haunt you!" Jan warned Forge as she made a beeline towards a dead-yet-alive bay mare. ~Hey! Tell Forge I'm gonna haunt him if he shoots me dead!~ Jan thought at Haller, not sure whether or not he would 'hear' her but not particularly caring at the moment.
"Watch out for Jan," Jim relayed. Concentration was becoming increasingly difficult; torn between searching for the source of the disturbance and reacting to the impending physical threat, it was all he could do to keep Jack from surfacing. To buy himself time, Jim drove one foot hard into the leg of an end-table to snap off a leg; he was less likely to switch with an alternative means of defense.
Making a face, Jan held out her hands and started zapping, beginning with the horse's neck. Whether she hit the right spot or the repeated and intensifying zaps did it she didn't know, but the horse dropped to the ground. Rather pleased with herself, she turned around and shrieked as she was attacked by a should-be-really-dead chicken.
"Are you kidding me?" she yelled to no one in particular as she zapped the foul fowl into what she hoped was a permanent death.
"Guys! Stench on our six!" Kyle yelled, diving and then snagging what looked to be a zombified barn cat out of mid-leap. "What the -fark-. I mean, seriously. We've got stuff coming in the back way too. We're surrounded." The cat's corpse was struggling in his grip - Kyle hesitated long enough to earn himself several ugly scratches, and then he tightened his grip, claws digging in, and the body went still. "Brainstem. Right." He confirmed, in a flat tone of voice.
Ororo had been so distracted by keeping tabs on the others - not that they weren't dealing admirably with the threat, but zombie animals had not been on the Danger Room training roster - that she neglected to notice an angry chicken that had managed to flap its way through one of the broken windows. It wasn't until she felt the sharp stinging sensation in her lower leg that she realized what was happening, and reacted automatically, planting her foot and pivoting to kick the bird away. The kick connected with the chicken's head and bent it backwards, which didn't stop it from running towards her again, colliding with her leg and flailing about in a way that would have been comical if it wasn't horrifying.
"Shit," Jim breathed, almost stumbling back into Forge as a dog missing half the skin on its muzzle darted towards him. He brought the tableleg down hard on its skull, staggering it, and then again to the side of its face. There was a crack -- one from splintering wood, and one of snapping vertebrae. Jim could feel his pulse in his ears as the carcass collapsed.
And then, down the second-floor stairs, came something far worse.
Moving more slowly than the animals and clenching their hands around the bannister by some kind of residual sense of self-preservation, a man and woman were descending. Their skin was blotchy with grey, their clothing stained in places by dark fluid. They moved like people in a dream, slow and purposeful.
The woman misstepped halfway down; she fell as bonelessly as a doll, and for a moment lay still at the bottom. The corpse of her husband proceeded after her, not even changing step. The tread of workboots on the wood pounded like a heartbeat. At the base of the stairs the woman began to grope her way to her feet.
Turning, Forge sighted down the barrel of the shotgun, then stopped. His hands shook, and he lowered the weapon, thumbing the safety on. "Those are people," he said in a wavering voice. "Those are... dead... people. And they're moving."
"Oh shit..." Kyle breathed. He froze, back against the wall, unwilling to approach the pair, and unable to retreat. "Oh shit, oh shit." He repeated, shaking his head slowly. He looked over his shoulder towards Jim, and then at Ororo, eyes wide with fear, and for once, shocked into silence.
That was enough.
He'd never used a shotgun, but he had Forge's example. Without a word, Jim took the gun from the younger man and stepped forward. Pull the lever down, then back up. Feel the round slide into the chamber. The rest were those things he had never forgotten: breathe, and sight, and squeeze the trigger.
The shots seemed very loud. The woman's face disintegrated in a shower of red, snapping her head back and dragging the rest of her body with it. Behind her the man had reached the ground floor. Face as slack as a stroke-victim's, the corpse started towards Kyle.
Ejecting the shells, Jim levered the hammer back again and realized he had nothing to reload. His head snapped towards Ororo, and paragraphs of meaning were packed into one word.
"Storm."
It wasn't easy, gathering that much energy and focusing it to avoid hitting any of the other (real, living) bodies in the room. On the other hand, it was surprisingly simple to direct the ball of lightning towards the man, stepping back to watch as it hovered slowly towards him, then enveloped him in its field.
The corpse went rigid and dropped to the ground, then twitched violently for a moment before again going still.
Jan stared at the unmoving bodies, nearly dropping out of the air in shock. Seeing the people moving had been pretty bad, but seeing them unmoving, like this, wasn't really any better.
It was the briefest of respites, but in the silence after the bodies dropped Ororo made a quick decision, having already sized up the small house and all possible entry points as they had fought off the first wave of zombified animals.
"We need to put an end to this." No telling how far the effect could stretch if they didn't. "Jan, Forge, stay here and watch this door. Kyle, you and I will cover the kitchen door. Haller..." She gave the slightest twitch of her shoulders, raising her chin towards the stairs. "Find Eric."
Their eyes locked for a moment, and then he nodded. There was no choice. It was clean up the mess, or stop the bleeding. Jim pushed the shotgun back into Forge's hands, spared himself a split-second to orient, and disappeared up the stairs.
---
Forge absently reloaded the shotgun, one pocket of his flight suit bulging with shells. Animated animal corpses were one thing, dead humans getting up and walking around was another. As far as his mind was concerned, that fell squarely in the Things That Should Not Be category, and thus was shoved into a back corner to deal with later. Possibly with a lot of twitching and screaming.
For the moment, though, he had to hold the line. Calling up another scan report from his spheres, still orbiting the farmhouse, he frowned. "Jan," he called to his miniscule teammate, "can you see anything?"
"Yep!" Jan replied cheerfully. "I see someone who can't hear me! I can say anything I want and you don't know what I'm saying! You won't know if I didn't hear you or what! Admit it, you just want me to get bigger so you can see me!"
Cocking his head, Forge tried to interpret what to his hearing was barely audible buzzing. "Crap, you don't have your amplifier," he mused. Or her uniform, he reminded himself, trying not to look directly at the tiny flying girl. "Okay, um... go around the corner, zap anything you see, and try and get it to chase you past the window. I won't fire until you're past me, okay?"
"Do zombie things pay any attention to insects?" Jan wondered, doubling her size to two inches as she followed Forge's instructions.
Jan's question was answered quickly, as a pair of sheep began awkwardly loping after her, matted hair clotted with fluids too foul to mention as they followed Jan around the lawn and back towards the shattered window. As soon as she zipped past Forge's head, he raised the shotgun to his shoulder, firing once, slapping the cocking lever down and up, then again. Two shots, two more undead animals added to the slowly-growing menagerie littering the lawn.
"Ew. OK, seriously, can't we just have maybe an end to this dead this that aren't?" Jan rolled her eyes as she caught sight of a few zombie birds in the air. "Fine. Avada Kedavra!" Jan raced towards the birds, hands held out and ready to zap... and then the nasty things just fell out of the sky and dropped down the ground with a sickening sound. "OK... ew!"
Arching an eyebrow behind his goggles, Forge paused and lowered the barrel of the shotgun. "Spheres one two one and one two two, perimeter scan. Report mobile masses under five kilograms. Execute."
The two silver globes buzzed around the farmhouse, relaying images of smaller animals - mice, birds, and rabbits, just slowly stopping and keeling over onto the ground.
Forge shrugged, keeping up his vigil. "Now that's just weird," he proclaimed.
"Yep, that's just weird," Jan agreed. Forgetting her current lack of clothing, she grew to her full size, careful not to touch any of the dead-and-hopefully-actually-dead animals. "Really, really weird."
Gritting his teeth and restraining the urge to look over his shoulder, Forge carefully wriggled out of his jacket and handed it back to Jan. "Here you go," he said as he kept his attention focused on the lawn. "I don't think there's much still moving out there," he reported, pitching his voice to carry through the house to his other team members. "Anyone else got anything?"
---
There were drying stains on the floor. The boxes in the attic looked like they might once have been set up in a kind of intentional maze, but some had been pushed over or shoved aside. Jim awkwardly picked through the mess, half-stooping to keep his head from banging on the rafters. Along with the dust, the room smelled like an electrical burn.
He'd seen the ladder hanging down on the second floor. The farm was a soup of undifferentiated psionic chaos, but Jim could make out one thing: fear. Eric's terror was the driving force, and when you were afraid the instinct was to go to a place you felt safe. In his gut, he knew this was Eric's.
Behind the stacks of boxes an area had been cleared. The floor was covered with handmade objects: skeletal buildings, wireframe models of humans and animals, geometric shapes; a foot-long truss bridge sat next to a hand-sized log cabin, while inside a simplistic corral ostriches strutted alongside horses, cows and goats. Off to the side a brontosaurus with a neck made of a single twisted stick writhed in combat with a tyrannosaurus.
Twigs and sticks, shoe laces, sewing thread, dirty yarn, scraps of rag, twist-ties. The entire area was filled with constructions of amazing delicacy, all twisted together out of junk and salvage into a world of its own. A half-finished geodesic dome sat next to a pile of delicate triangles, a ruler and a rusting x-acto knife nearby.
And in the corner, a body.
It was almost impossible to guess what it had looked like before. The flesh was charred and split, like a burn victim; all that could be distinguished now was that it had been short, and a little husky. A few tufts of brown hair still clung to the scalp. The eyes were white and clouded.
Carefully stepping around the fragile models, Jim approached. He knelt down beside the boy to touch his blackened hand as he locked gaze with the blind eyes. To the presence imbuing the farm, but specifically this attic, the telepath sent:
#Hello, Eric. I'm Jim.#
The boy was past the point of words, but a jumble of images and impressions supplied the reply. Walking into the house to the sound of the phone slamming, and his father coming up with that familiar look on his face that made his mother leave the room without a word. The first close-fisted blow, and the next, and the next.
Then the pain.
Jim had enough experience to keep his feelings out of their contact, but he couldn't stop himself from squeezing his eyes shut. Charles had been right in his concern. The father -- the lethal mutation -- it had been too late for Eric from the moment the phonecall had ended.
Exhaling, the telepath opened his eyes again. Smoothing his mind into calm reassurance, he squeezed the cracking flesh.
#Listen, Eric, it's okay. It wasn't your fault.# Diffusing his own mind, Jim reached out across the farm to envelope what was left of the boy. #We're not here to hurt you. Just relax. You're safe.# The contact hurt. Eric was still tied to flesh -- his own, and the ones killed in the eruption of his power. The corpses were all moving on borrowed energy, and Eric was running dry.
Inhale, exhale. Muting the pain as much as he could, Jim put both hands over Eric's hand and said the words he knew the boy needed to hear.
#It's okay to let go now.#
There was no rushing this, no hurry. When what he had known would happen finally began, the telepath just closed his eyes and let it come.
In his room upstairs, listening for how the door, the barometer of his father's mood, would close. Praying that it would be soft so he could come down for dinner, chest tightening with fear that it would be hard enough he'd want to spend the rest of the night in the attic.
The day after learning to make god's eyes in elementary school, picking up every twig, loose string and piece of shoelace just in case. The other kids watching and whispering that he had no real toys, and this time not caring. He had a Plan.
The day before Easter Sunday dyeing eggs with his mother for the church egg hunt, his mother instructing him on how to turn each egg and lower it only halfway to create something two-colored, or three, or four. Face still aching from the thrashing of dropping half the morning's lay, he breathed in the vinegary smell of the dye and dipped.
How much it had hurt to breathe for weeks after his father had let him have it for forgetting the pasture gate and letting three of the horses lose. The only time his father had ever stomped him instead of using his hands or the piece of hose always hanging on a hook on the kitchen door.
The day last summer picking ticks off one of the dogs. How they were so swollen all he had to do was reach into the grimy fur and wiggle them until they came free. Throwing them against the barn wall so hard they spattered like water balloons.
The trip to an orchard almost a decade ago, his father lifting him up on his shoulders so he could pick the highest apples. Tension of the branch, pulling an apple until it bowed. His father, holding the cloth sack between his teeth, reaching up and breaking the stem for him. Passing the apple down for his father to take. And his father, moving them to the next tree, each step a bounce for his son.
The day . . .
The day . . .
The day . . .
Rolling over Jim was everything that was Eric Patrick Wilson, aged 14, only child of Robert and Melissa Wilson. As darkness began to close the telepath simply remained beside him, holding his hand.
Waiting for the end.
---
Ororo didn't normally have a problem with dead things. As a consummate believer in the cycle of life, she was fully aware of the necessity and even benefits of death, and had come to terms with it some time ago. Dead things that walked, however, and wanted to eat your flesh? Those she had a problem with.
Stationed at a now-open window, the weatherworker was manipulating the air around the house, keeping the worst of the flocks of angry, hungry birds away and scanning the surrounding area for any larger animals that might be approaching. It seemed only a matter of time before they found their way to the house.
Until now, Kyle had never considered the merits of a purely vegetable-based diet. Vegans were weird people, and some of their food smelled funny. Even if Karolina was really nice and cute. But after the fourth or fifth zombie chicken, and the second still-moving corpse of a calf, he was seriously considering it. At least until he could look at a hamburger and not see the face of the undead baby cows.
He'd taken up a position at the half-barricaded back door -anything smaller then a breadbox met its re-demise via claws, or being crushed
between the table they'd pushed against the door and the door itself. Anything that got past that, well, it had just been the one calf, and Kyle was hoping it wouldn't be anything else. Breaking a baby cow's neck was not fun, and not something he ever wanted to repeat again.
Ororo's hair was practically on end with all the electricity waiting for her call - she must have looked a sight, though that was the last thing on her mind right now. "Do you see any more?" she asked, knowing Kyle's vision was sharper than hers in the dusky light.
Kyle went silent and still for a moment - more so then he'd been before, cocking his remaining ear towards the outside grounds. His nose had long since given up - all he could smell was decay and blood and rotting meat in abundance, and while he could see in the dim light, he was reduced to catching movement long before he could identify anything clearly. "I can't see anything, but there's still some noises. Something's thrashing around, but not close. Maybe something stuck in a building or something." Or under the plane. He didn't want think about that.
With a nod, Ororo diverted her attention enough to glance behind at the interior of the cabin; save for the downed corpses there was nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary to indicate that Forge and Jan were having any trouble with their end of the house.
Kyle was more than a little - really, kind of a whole lot disturbed by how easily it had become routine to wait for the sounds of something moving, let it get just inside the door, and kick it in the face or neck until it fell over. Or smash it against the table until it stopped moving. It was a lot like moving the pig carcasses in Vegas, except with more noises, and more horrible smells and more wanting to take a hot shower for the rest of his entire life.
So when the pair of raccoon went limp and fell over before he could even touch them, all he could do was stare for several seconds before slowly putting his foot back on the ground. "Uh. Uh. Storm?" He said, tenatively. "I, uh... they're dead. Dead-er. Something."
Frowning, Ororo turned back to where Kyle stood, eyeing the dead(er) animals with some doubt. "I... you mean you did not do that?"
"Nuh-uh." Kyle grunted, shaking his head. "Didn't even touch 'em.. They just ... made like they were trying to get in and then flopped over." He kept staring at the raccoons on the ground, and then looking up out the door, and then returning his attention to the still unmoving corpses. "Does it seem real quiet to you too?"
She didn't say 'eerily so' but wanted to, instead just nodding and moving to the window to look outside. There were small bodies littered all over the ground, and much further away Ororo thought she could see a half-dozen larger figures approaching the house.
The donkeys. She was not looking forward to this.
As she watched, however, they began to slow, then stagger, and before she could believe it they had fallen to the ground. There was no movement to them after that.
Where Kyle's attention had been switching from the raccoons to the donkeys, now it was firmly on Ororo. "That wasn't you anymore than the raccoons were me, was it?" His eyes twitched over to the door a few times, but his head didn't move, as if he was trying to force himself to stop looking.
"...no." She stared a moment longer at the inert bodies on the ground, as if waiting for them to climb back to their feet and resume their gruesome progress towards the house. When they didn't, she shook her head and started for the stairs, already halfway up them by the time she remembered to give orders. "Stay here. I am going to find out what happened." And hope that it is over, one way or another.
---
She climbed the stairs slowly, the urgency of wanting to learn what had happened mixed with caution. The three trainees downstairs were still on edge, but the threat seemed to have halted, at least for the moment, and Ororo suspected it may have had something to do with Haller's disappearance.
Winding her way through a maze of battered cardboard boxes, the silver-haired woman carefully made her way further into the attic, breath held in anticipation of what she might find. Please, goddess, no more zombies...
But there were only two figures waiting for her at the end of the maze: her teammate, and the twisted, empty shape of Eric Wilson.
The telepath was still crouched in the forest of models, his profile impassive. Though he said nothing, when he finally raised his eyes to her the slow shake of his head was answer enough.
Ororo pressed her lips together, casting her gaze down to the husk of the young man that rested on the floor next to Haller's knees. It was obvious where the drive for the reanimated corpses had come, and why it had ended so suddenly; she hoped that wherever he was, Eric was at peace.
"We should go - it surely will not be long before someone comes to investigate what has happened here," she murmured. Of course, there was little to be said that could explain away the shell-ridden corpses and pulverized remains of the various farm animals both inside and outside the house. If only there was a way of erasing the evidence...
Blinking, the weatherworker glanced back up at Haller, her expression pensive. "There is little here that would lend itself to an explanation to the authorities. It might be best if we were to remove the signs altogether."
Standing now, Jim looked back down at the corpse. It had been a long time since he had thought of the body as anything more than a sort of elaborate glove for the mind, but it didn't seem right just to leave him. Still, there was a cold ball of certainty in his gut that this was something the trainees should not have to see. They'd already seen enough. But Ororo was right; they couldn't leave this for someone to find and plaster across the headlines. An entire life reduced to one lethal accident.
"Yeah," Jim replied, his voice devoid of inflection, "I agree."
There was a replica of a horse made of twigs and wire by his foot. Stooping down, Jim carefully picked up the little toy. It felt more solid than it looked. He slipped it into his coat pocket and turned back to Ororo.
"What do you want to do?"
---
The skies were clear and dark by the time they made it outside; the absence of any light pollution meant that the stars overhead were starkly visible. Everyone's eyes, however, were focused on the tiny farmhouse a few hundred yards in front of them, now still and quiet and devoid of any life, reanimated or not.
Ororo let the silence stretch out for a time. She thought of the young man who had died that day, and his parents, and the many small lives that had also been ended in the unfortunate turn of events. She hoped once more that they had found peace, a peace that obviously had not been present in their lifetimes, and drew in a deep breath of the cold night air.
"Let us begin."
Beside her, Jim nodded. He took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together, feeling the warmth of friction, fingers brushing the scars that marred his right. In that familiar warmth, he let his mind be overtaken by the one that had been waiting just below the surface.
When their eyes opened again it was Cyndi looking out, but for once she said nothing. All her attention was focused on the farmhouse, the sad, dark shapes scattered across the lawn, and the even sadder shapes she knew were insider. The fire waiting inside every one of them hummed against her brain, begging to be released. To be free. The pyrokinetic stretched out her hands, palms out, and let it go.
The glow was gentle at first, but when Ororo's wind found it it began to leap. Big, bigger than Cyndi had ever tried to create, but she had to keep pushing. The birds, the animals -- even from here it smelled like a barbecue mixed with burning hair. The stars were beginning to grow hazy from the smoke. The smell of woodfire mingled as the house caught. Fire crawl up the walls, across the roof. Curtains began to curl in the heat. The corpses. The models. She spun to flame every surface her mind could touch.
Burning it all away.
Though the fire leapt and licked hungrily at the house, it was still slow going. The rafters caught after a time, and the roof began to glow, the entire scene shimmering against the sky like a hellish mirage. Finally the sounds of groaning reached their ears as the timbers weakened, and it was with a loud crack that the beams finally split and buckled, falling in on themselves and burying the interior under a pile of smoldering wreckage.
When the heat touched her face Ororo tipped it back, closing her eyes as she called down the rains. The gentle fall was enough to keep the fire from spreading, and any outcropping patches were treated to a more intense shower until they extinguished.
She didn't know how long it had been when she finally opened her eyes to find the house little more than a smoldering heap, the shapes that had been bodies on the lawn little more than piles of charred ash. The area still felt wrong, but the cleansing properties of the fire and rain had done what they could to rid it of its taint. There wasn't anything left for them here.
"That's enough," she murmured, surprised to find her throat tight and dry. She swallowed and then tried again, turning away from the glowing scene. "That's enough. Let us go."
Cyndi nodded, her body still sticky with sweat from the effort. Even with Ororo's help sustaining something of that intensity had cost her. Exhausting, but it was done.
In deference to Jim, she let him pretend the tears drying on their face were hers.
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