Day Zero - Besieged

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Marie-Ange has a vision of things to come, and it is not good.


Though Mark's mood had noticeably improved overnight, everyone else was still down and they didn't seem to appreciate Mark's efforts to cheer them up. After a number of failed jokes and no less than a few curses hurled at him, he decided to give up and join Marie-Ange. "Feelin' any better?"

"Not particularly." Marie-Ange had somehow managed to wash her hair, and looked less like something the cat had drug in, but still looked weary and the pain of the headaches showed on her face. "I think the headaches are getting worse.." Aspirin didn't even dent them, and she'd resorted to attempting meditation, and that had been no more successful than it was when she was first learning to live with her precognition.

"Want some water or anything? Vodka? That's the good thing about being stuck in a club. Lots of alcohol." Which he still wasn't drinking, dammit.

"Not unless you have a hidden deck of tarot cards, or someone who can teleport me to my apartment." Marie-Ange wasn't really trying to be difficult, it was that she had a migraine and no way to channel it into anything -useful-. "Or a lot of vicodin, and I am not sure that would ... wait, you said you had none before, yes?" She remembered that, or thought she did.

"No vicodin, no tarot cards. Just booze and bar napkins. There might be a pencil somewhere?"

Marie-Ange opened her mouth to say something and then closed it, instead standing up, taking Mark by the hand and practically dragging him across Silver's floor. "Pencil. Where?" She demanded, pulling Mark with her behind one of the bars and digging around in the shelves. The rummaging turned up not only bar napkins but a stack of dusty blank white index cards. "Index cards! Index cards!!" Marie-Ange held them up in one hand triumphantly.

"Yay?" Mark rubbed his wrist gingerly. "Angie, you okay? I mean, relatively speaking. You're doing the weird crazy thing now. Let's get you a bottle of Tylenol and you can go lie down . . ."

"Pencil. I need a pencil, or a pen. Something to draw with!" Marie-Ange was almost giddy. "I can get rid of my headache, I can make this make sense but I need to be able to draw!" She had already taken a small portion of the index cards and was shuffling them against the bar's counter. "Something is going to happen, I need to know what. I need to have my cards, and I do not have them so I need to make them!"

Oh snap. "Uh, pencil pencil pencil . . ." Mark frantically joined Marie-Ange in the search, and after a minute found a pen in the cash register. "Eureka. Now draw, woman." His heart pounded in anticipation, and he prayed that it was good news.

The tarot deck that Marie-Ange sketched out was only the 22 cards of the major Arcana, and 'sketched' was a gross exaggeration of what she did. Stick figures, with the details of the cards only drawn enough that she could recognize what each card was. The Hermit's lantern was a tiny rectangle, and his staff another line down the card. The crowns, the animals, everything looked as though it could have come from a child's drawing taped to a refrigerator. But it only took a few minutes, and when she was done, Marie-Ange cut and shuffled the cards together several times.

Once satisfied with the shuffle, she peeled three cards off the top of the deck, slapping them down on the counter and then scooping them back up almost as fast as she dealt them. After the eighth such deal, she set the entire deck down before reshuffling, putting the cards deliberately on top of the deck and then scattering them across the bar counter.

Mark examined the impromptu cards and shook his head. "I . . . don't know what any of this means. Are you seeing anything?"

Marie-Ange gathered up the cards she'd strewn across the bar counter and shuffled them one last time. Carefully, she put the top three down on the counter, and this time, did not pick them back up again. "Justice, The Fool, and The Devil, reversed." She explained, pointing to each card in turn. "Do.. do not take this the wrong way, but The Fool is your signifier card. It does not mean someone who is foolish, but a young man on a journey. Someone who is lighthearted and quite social and is changing his life. The others.. if I am interpreting this right, and it does match what I have already seen, there is going to be a fight, and ... you are going to have to defend people you are protecting." She looked around the club, and nodded her head towards the small groups of refugees. "I can only assume that it means that we will be attacked here, since I have gotten these cards, now five times out of ten, and frequency usually indicates urgency. It would also explain the severity of my headache."

"Fuck." That came out a little louder than he'd meant it to. He glanced around nervously, his mind already providing images of what could happen to these people. "When? By who? Can we stop them?"

"I do not know. My sense of time is not perfect even on a good day, and I have never known the timeframe for a prediction. Soon is the best I can tell you." Marie-Ange shook her head and looked over at Mark. "Justice is a card of protection, Mark. I think..." No, if she was interpreting this correctly, it was something Mark had to do himself. She could almost hear Tante Mattie's voice reminding her not to meddle. "What do you think that means?"

Mark stared at the crude drawings and silently cursed them, as if they were at fault for what was going to come. "If we're going to be attacked, then we have to get ready now. Okay, listen up, people!" he shouted. Everyone's attention immediately fell on him. "We've got a bit of trouble here. Seems like they've found us." He didn't need to elaborate on who they were, as everyone promptly began to freak out. "Hey! Eyes on me! We've got the advantage, though, because we know about them but they don't know we do. Angie, what else do you see?"

Marie-Ange pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to focus through the headache. It wasn't lessening much at all. "Very little useful, I am afraid. An attack, fighting, fortifications... " She gestured with her free hand towards the cards. "If I had time to draw the rest of a deck, I might be able to see more, but that will take a very long time. The other cards that came up.. I am not sure they have anything to do with the attack. It .. this is very hard to explain, they just do not seem related."

"Keep trying if you can, hon. We need every bit of info we can get." Mark turned back to the panicked masses. "OK, people, listen up. Here's the plan . . ."

~*~

Silver is under siege, but those taking refuge there band together to hold the line.


The silence in Silver could only be described as ghostly. Even over the past three days there was always someone talking or helping others, but now under the threat of attack, it was like a graveyard. The comparison to Anne Frank never seemed more apt. But Mark, gripping his iPhone tightly and triple-checking the headphones he wore around his neck, swore to himself that they would not - could not - end up the same. "It's the waiting that always gets me," he whispered to Jean-Phillipe. The tall lanky kid who had directed Jean-Phillipe and Pete to Caliban (and who stood twenty feet away) frowned at Mark. "What? I hate anxiety."

"Mon Dieu, for someone who got laid earlier, you certainly are high-strung," Jean-Phillipe murmured in a low voice, but certainly loud enough for the young man with the sensitive ears. "Do I need to take you back to the office again?" he asked, taking a drag on his cigarette.

Marie-Ange raised an eyebrow at her cousin and then proceeded to keep ignoring him. She really didn't want to know any more about his sex life than she already did. She had spent several minutes using the index cards to draw any number of things she felt might help, and was habitually shuffling through the cards as they waited. "I think I prefer waiting to being surprised. At least we have had time to prepare." They had practically gutted the sparse furniture around club's floor and the makeshift partitions and cots that the refugees had setup, and turned them into crude barricades and blockades - places to hide, and take cover, and to confuse anyone who might get past the front doors. If they were expecting a big open space, and got what looked more like a cobbled-together pile of junk, those seconds of confusion would be very valuable.

And just a few seconds later they would find out. Everyone turned to face the front doors as something inhumanly heavy banged, nearly knocking it off its hinges. "Awfully direct, aren't they?" Mark muttered. Green energy washed over his hands. "Come on, bitches. Come and get it." When the door finally burst open, Mark grin viciously. "NOW!" he shouted, and suddenly Silver was alight with half a dozen energy blasts of different colors. The attackers, whoever they were, didn't know what hit them.

"Holy shit!" a voice yelled from behind the door, followed by the sound of something solid hitting trash cans and possible a wall. There was a grunt and more cursing as the attackers spread themselves out, trying to avoid getting hit. "Oh. Hey. Hey. Something in that mix made me feel pretty good. Marky Mark, is that you? 'Course it is, can't leave your precious little humans who love mutants who love their humans club behind, can you?" A flurry of whispers and then a faint, "And a one and a two and a one, two, three..."

The building rang like a gong as a scream ripped through the front doors, shattering glasses and knocking some unfortunate defenders to their feet.

What came out of Mark's mouth next would have made a sailor blush if he could even hear it in the first place. The sonic scream flung Mark back a few feet, but he knew well enough to roll with it. He counted seven others along with the screamer, a shithead about his own age named David Angar whom he remembered quite vividly being kicked out one Friday night for venting his frustrations on a couple of humans. "'Marky Mark?' Really? Please, I look better in my underwear than that asshole."

One of the other attackers was the first to charge forward. A vaguely simian-looking man, he sprang over the barricade, swinging off a light fixture on the wall, and onto the nearest defender. His arms wrapped around Jean-Phillipe's neck, but fell quickly away when electricity rippled up and down the Frenchman's body. The ape-faced man staggered back, twitching uncontrollably, his fur smoking in patches.

With the number of people they had defending Silver, Marie-Ange had the luxury of being able to pick her targets, this time the man who had leapt on her cousin so rudely. She didn't bother with the imaged staff, or a sword - with arms like that, her potential opponent could get it from her possibly faster than she could hurt him with it. But it wasn't as though she needed them, she just preferred them. As he staggered back, she moved in, destroying one of his knees with a well-placed kick, and then shoving him to the ground hard. A few more kicks to the ribs and the man stopped moving, except for a few twitches of pain.

"Aw man, why'd you have to go and do that for?" Angar asked, spreading his arms in dismay at the smoking, bleeding, still body of the mutant. "My friend was going to let me find him a beanie after this was all over." A young woman raised glowing hands in his direction but his scream sent her tumbling backwards. She landed on the ground and then started screaming, slapping at her skin, sobbing about all the ants biting at her flesh. "First no monkey with a beanie and now this. This, boys and girls, is what you get for fucking humans in your spare time. Gross."

"Wah wah wah." Mark directed another blast at Angar and then another at where he predicted Angar would move to. "The whole 'I hate flatscans' thing got old years ago. Find a new shtick or STFU. 'Kay?"

Marie-Ange turned away from the prone form of the man she had just kicked half to death and moved towards a long-limbed man in a striped shirt and black pants who was strangling a small purple-haired young woman with absurdly long fingers. But before she could do anything more than grab his shirt and try to pull him off the girl, she was knocked off her feet by a large blur, that stopped and became a man who looked just too big to be able to run that fast. He wasn't tall, or particularly muscular - he was quite chubby, the kind of fat that mothers would call husky. Big, all over, and carrying the weight everywhere. He laughed, a wheezy and nasty sounding almost-bray and grabbed Marie-Ange's shirt. "Wanna go for a ride, baby?" He said, still laughing nasally.

Speedsters. Perhaps he was biased, given the opinion of Pietro Maximoff that had been inculcated in him, but this one seemed more like one of those annoying people that never outgrew being the schoolyard bully. Still, the greasy man with the stretching limbs seemed a bit more urgent, as the girl he was strangling was gasping and choking for breath. Plus, the fact that he was standing at a distance to use his powers allowed Jean-Phillipe more room to cut loose, rather than the precision he would have needed to blast the speedster off of Marie-Ange. Besides, from the way she'd kicked the one mutant, she seemed as though she could take care of herself.

He twisted at the waist, directing two successive blasts of electricity at the man with flicks of his wrists. His target twisted impossibly, his body seemingly made of elastic. Letting his fingers loose from the girl's throat, he flexed them, his attention now firmly on Jean-Phillipe. "So you want a taste of the Lash, do you?" Jean-Phillipe rolled his eyes. "Oh, please. Blow me, cul."

Cursing, Angar used a somehow still standing chair to pull himself to his feet. Shaking his head, he bounced up and down for a moment as if to settle various pieces back into place. "Oh please, sir, can I have another?" he whined as he sucked in a deep breath, shoulders back, chest puffed out. The next scream sent Mark off his feet and tore up a good section of floorboards. "Whatever you can do I can - you know, my love of quoting things is starting to annoy even me. Anyway." He ducked someone as they were thrown behind the bar and advanced on the currently downed mutant. "You just keep throwing that shit, Marky, and I'll just keep getting stronger. Mmm, tastes like chocolate."

"You should meet my friend Doug," Mark said groggily. "You'd get along. Until, you know, you started being an ass." The room was spinning and it looked like three Angars were standing over him, but after two years of working with the best in the business, when he lashed out with his legs he struck home. If he'd been coherent enough to put more force behind it, he might have been able to shatter some kneecaps. As Angar crashed to the ground, Mark scrambled back to his feet and quickly changed the track on his iPhone. The Black Crowes shut up and gave the stage to TI, and Mark's green energy melted into crackling blue lightning.

Marie-Ange didn't even respond to the failed attempt at what was either a lame pick-up line or a even lamer taunt. Before she could do anything, the large man had her over his shoulder and was heading towards the door, building up speed. But as fast as he could move, he'd not planned for his victim to be anything more than a pretty face. He had certainly not expected to have have the presence of mind to fight back, and the last thing he would have ever expected was to have the waistband of his briefs pulled halfway up his back. He gave wedgies, he wasn't supposed to get them. But it had been the only thing Marie-Ange could do, thrown over a shoulder like that. She didn't have the leverage to elbow him in the head, or to do more than kick weakly.

The big speedster stumbled, and it gave Marie-Ange the chance to push herself off his shoulder - her landing wasn't even close to graceful, but it didn't matter, since she was away from her attacker. He recovered fast - naturally, since he was a speedster, but the momentary distraction gave Marie-Ange a chance to get one of the hand-drawn index cards out and ready, and to get to her feet and start running away.

Lash snapped his fingers forward and around another blast from Jean-Phillipe, wrapping them around his throat and slowly constricting. Jean-Phillipe merely smirked. "You...hnh...are not very smart, are you?" he choked out before wrapping his hands around Lash's fingers and triggering his power yet again. Lash screamed in pain and staggered backward, his fingers writhing on the ground and refusing to obey his commands. Jean-Phillipe did not allow him time to recover, moving forward and backhanding the other mutant with a charged-up hand. He snorted as Lash slumped back against the wall, unconscious. "'A taste of the Lash'. Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound?" he asked rhetorically, winding up and giving his opponent a sharp kick in the ribs for good measure.

Two down, six to go. Marie-Ange seemed to have a good hand on the speedster, and those few refugees who could stand to fight were keeping the other four away from those who didn't. Mark couldn't help but smile proudly as the telekinetic Ray bounced one like a rubber ball. He fell to the ground in a crumpled heap after a couple of laps, but before Ray could celebrate, he was swept up in a wave of water and pinned to the wall. The hydrokinetic, and older man with bright blue eyes that suggested Nordic descent, snapped his fingers and froze the water, impaling Ray. The boy didn't even make a sound as a thousand spears of ice pierced his body.

There was no time to mourn. Blinded by a sudden rage he barely knew he possessed, Mark pounced on the hydrokinetic. He conjured up another wave, but that was exactly what Mark had been expecting, and released his full fury on the man who had just slaughtered. "Time to learn your physics." Mark's voice hissed like a staticky speaker. "Water is a good conductor of electricity, true or false? Give up? False. Pure water doesn't conduct, but salt water does. And guess what your body is full of? Aren't you glad to have learned something today?" The body fell lifeless to the ground, charred and smoking.

Mark was sent tumbling to the ground but not by a sonic scream. Angar had found a bar stool and had decided to go old school while the other man was busy seeking his revenge. With a shrug, he tossed the now broken pieces over his shoulder - not caring that they hit one of his own men in the head. "Oh man, do you know how excited I was when I came to New York and heard about Silver?" he asked, hands clenching by his side. "A place for mutants that was in the open! I had no idea that you let our lessers in until about a week went by and then I kept coming back, trying to convert the place but oh no. This was my refuge, you complete wannabe loser."

The next scream completely destroyed what remained behind the bar before turning it onto Mark, the sound warping into hallucinations that only he could see. Angar wasn't very inventive but he was very, very thorough when it came to the details. Human thugs that were armed and more than willing to put a filthy little mutie down. "I'll finish you off and then rip this place apart."

Marie-Ange didn't get more than a few yards before the speedster caught up with her - but that was exactly what she had planned. As he came up next to her, she dropped to the ground, landing hard on her butt. As she'd guessed, the big man was fast, but his reflexes were only so good, and he ran straight into the wall that she had created as she hit the ground. It dissolved on the impact of several hundred pounds hitting it at blur-worthy speeds, but her attacker fell to his knees, one hand cradling a nose that was bleeding freely and already swelling up.

Jean-Phillipe wobbled slightly on his feet. He had put out a lot of power in a short amount of time, and his body ached in protest. But he couldn't just sit down and rest in the middle of a melee, so he flung himself at the speedster as he was clutching at his face. Although he was much lighter than the heavyset mutant, the element of surprise was on Jean-Phillipe's side, and he tackled the man to the ground, slamming his face into the floor. He wrapped his arms and legs around his opponent, so that when he attempted to blindly accelerate to break free, Jean-Phillipe went with him. With the Frenchman's arms around his head, Speed couldn't see where he was going, and he plowed headfirst into the remains of the bar with a sickening wet crunch. Speed's body protected Jean-Phillipe from the worst of the collision, but he was still stunned, and rolled limply off to one side.

Mark cried out, half in pain and half fear. His face and arms were covered in burning little cuts from the bar's shattered liquor bottles. He tried to stand but Speed's impact and the spilled alcohol sent him back to the floor. The mob was closing in on him and he could barely hear his music over the sounds of battle. He swore loudly when he cut his hand on a broken bottle of Parrot Bay, but in a moment of lucidity he picked up and hurled the heavy glass at one of the thugs. The bottle passed through it and smacked Angar square on the forehead. The vision immediately dissipated, and Mark took the opportunity to get up, haul Jean-Phillipe to his feet and throw them both behind an upturned table where Marie-Ange waited.

"I thought they'd be dangerous fuckers like Caliban," he panted, his shaking hands fumbling with his iPhone. "And then it's just Angar the Shithead and his posse of wannabes so I thought it'd be nothing. But they . . . fuck, they killed. I killed. Angie, we've gotta stop this now. No one here's ready for this. They didn't ask this to come to them."

"How many of them do you know?" Marie-Ange asked, and moved closer to Mark to pick a few pieces of glass from his shoulder. "This Angar, he is like Terry, yes? Very loud? Can he be overloaded?" She looked around the table, to see two of the refugees throwing one of the mob bodily out the front doors. "I think that .. these are your people, yes? They may not have asked for this, but they are fighting all the same. There were... eight, and four... no, five" From where she crouched, she could see that the big speedster was lying on the floor, his neck at an angle that was obviously fatal. "are dealt with. This fight is almost over, I think."

Jean-Phillipe panted as he hunched over. "I am nearly spent," he admitted. "I have used more power than perhaps I should have already. You know this man, Mark. What is his weakness?" This place was Mark's, these people were his, and this enemy was his.

"I don't know. I've only met him a few times, and I only really talked to him the night we kicked him out because he was trying to raise shit." Mark rubbed his temples as if that would help him think better. "He needs to be heard to be effective. If . . ." His line of thought was cut off by a sonic scream that shattered the table and threw them all back. But when Angar opened his mouth to shriek again, the butterfly girl Debbie zipped by and he inhaled the hallucinogenic glitter left in her wake. She was too exhausted and scared to put much oomph into her bizarre secretion, but it was the distraction that Mark needed. She gave Mark a thumbs up before gliding back into battle against a spider-like mutant. "Oh snap. JP, throw anything you've got left at him. Just do whatever you can to keep him off my ass for thirty seconds."

'Anything you've got left' was a weak bolt of electricity and the shattered leg of the table. The electricity spilled onto the floor in front of Angar, but the table leg landed squarely against his shoulder and knocked him slightly off balance.

It was enough of a distraction for Mark to run over to his DJ booth (which was shockingly still mostly in one piece) and secure his set of noise-eliminating headphones. He plugged them in and placed them over his ears. The club went almost silent, one of Angar's power sources now cut off, and Mark was soon consumed by the haunting notes of Mussorgsky. "Yo, Angar!" he shouted, though he could barely hear himself. "Choke on this." A bubble of blue-yellow energy appeared over the other man's head, and Mark gestured with a clenched fist as he tightened it to cut off his air supply.

It was like a shrinking fish bowl of doom. Angar thrashed as he clawed desperately at the bubble cutting off his oxygen, quickly discarding the idea of trying to scream his way out. It didn't take long before his eyes rolled back up in his head and he slumped to the floor, unconscious.

Mark didn't let up for another few seconds, and then gave Angar a kick in the gut to make sure he was out. He grinned at Jean-Phillipe and Marie-Ange. "All right. These fuckers are done."

Marie-Ange didn't answer, she turned and face blank, darted to the back of the club and one of the few piles of supplies. "Pants. I need PANTS. And water. Do we have any bottled water?" It was abrupt and demanding and she didn't stop moving, finding a backpack and opening the storerooms to let the refugees out of their safe space and emerging from one of the back rooms stuffing a pair of black sweatpants into the bookbag. "Bottled water. I need to leave, I need to leave now. Doug needs help, and if I do not show Emma where to find him, he is going to -die-."

She didn't wait for a reaction, took the bottles of water that one of the confused but grateful refugees was handing her and then turned and ran out the front door without another word.

"Oh...snap?" Jean-Phillipe said questioningly, looking over at Mark as if to ask "Did I do that right?"

"Leave it to the professionals. Now." Mark nearly blasted the spider mutant's arm off and saved Debbie from possible decapitation. "Let's clean the rest up."