The girl had stopped twitching and screaming and laid still, her eyes closed and her chest moving at normal pace, rising and falling when she breathed. She was sleeping.
It was only fair to assume that Entragian had activated her skin as well as Logan’s healing. He wasn’t going to take any risks. He nudged her gently with the toe of his boot, trying to rouse her.
“Time to rise and shine… Wake up, kid.” She only curled on her side to a tight ball.
“Hey! Wake up!” He nudged again. Her eyelids fluttered open. She bolted at her feet screaming, wiping her mouth, her whole body twisting and shaking. He dodged her flailing arms, then swiped her knees with one well-aimed kick, dropping her back on the ground, landing on top of her and pinning her down with his forearms crossed over her chest.
“Marie! Wake up!”
She was still crying and struggling, but he could see the sense returning in to her eyes. She was calming down.
“Hush.” He stole her eyes, willing her to look at him rather than trying to see up on the dark sky. Tips of their noses were nearly touching. She started to move, trying to push him off.
“Your skin is on. Stop moving and calm down. Entragian turned our mutations on, that’s all what happened! Calm down. Move another inch and I’m toast.” That seemed to get trough the terror, and the girl froze under him, wide eyes now glued to his, barely breathing.
“Can I let you go now?” He asked. She blinked few times.
“Yes. Yes… I’m… I’m alright now…”
“You sure about that?”
“Oh, my God! Get off from me! I don’t want to hurt you! Get off!” The girl practically screamed. He flinched and rolled off from her.
“Goddamned, I’m not deaf…”
She scooted on her feet, staring at him.
“You knew my skin is on. What the hell were you thinking? Coming that close to me…”
“You have clothes on. And I wasn’t going to let you run off. Plus I got to prove my earlier statement.”
“Huh?”
“It took exactly five seconds to get between your knees,” he smirked.
“You… You asshole! We’re probably going to die soon, and that’s all you’re thinking?” She hissed. He shrugged his shoulders. Asphalt under his buttocks felt cold and hard. Dark shadow of the godlike entity hung high above them. He was tired. He was pissed off. Worried over Xavier. Worried over the girl. Worried over his own miserable ass. And the girl looked about ready to bite his head off, eyes blazing, long, brown hair whipping in the wind, bright red of anger was coloring her cheekbones, and suddenly on top of everything he was plain horny. Horny as hell.
“Yeah. We’re going to die. Let’s fuck.”
“Sure! … Uh… What?”
“You heard me.”
“You do realize that ‘we’re going to die, let’s have sex’ isn’t the most romantic thing to say to a girl?”
“You do realize that only reason I stopped to give you a ride was because I thought I could nail you later?”
“Oh, and now is the time to pay for the ride? Do you except foreign currency? I’m partly Russian from my mother’s side of the family.”
“Fuck this. Get over here…”
“Hey! Careful!”
He grabbed her wrist when she stepped closer and pulled her on his lap, her thighs straddling his hips, his face buried to the side of her neck, shielded from her skin by her long, cascading hair. He locked his hands around her tightly, and soon her struggles ceased.
“I stopped because I thought I could nail you. I gave you a ride instead because I could tell you weren’t looking for a fuck. Right now I’m tired, horny and scared to shitless. And feeling more than a little guilty of bringing you in to this mess. I do want to fuck you, but what happens is up to you. If we fuck, it happens because you want that too, and you shouldn’t see it as a payment of any kind.”
“Uh… Can we take a raincheck for that? We’re both kind of icky right now and besides we probably don’t have enough time…” To his surprise he felt her fingers combing through his hair in a comforting gesture. And there was a definite change in her chemistry. Less fear. More curiosity and lust. He nuzzled his face against her brown tresses and inhaled her scent, letting it soothe his nervousness and anxiety.
“Raincheck. I can live with that…” He murmured releasing her.
“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” He asked when they climbed up from the pavement, brushing their clothes.
“Did what?” The girl asked, wide-eyed innocence covering her visage.
“Now I have to come up with a plan how to get rid of Entragian without getting killed doing it…”
“Jesus H. Christ, this place reeks!” The girl huffed when they walked a narrow path towards a small tin shack. Word ‘Office’ had been painted on top of a narrow door.
“Probably because of all the bodies. What the fuck has been going on in here?” Logan eyed their surroundings puzzled. Ground was littered with bodies that looked distorted and torn, almost as if they had blown up from inside out. He counted at least fifteen bodies in various stages of decomposition, some of them more brutalized than others. One of the bodies caught his eye especially, a large man lying face down right next to the tin shack. There was something seriously wrong with it, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was bothering him with it.
Among rotting carcasses there were large splatters of blood and entrails, and it took them a while to realize that they were actually bodies as well. Broken down, nearly liquefied forms of birds, coyotes, even pumas.
“I think I’m going to be sick…” The girl muttered palm covering her mouth when her foot slipped and an eyeball squished under the sole of her sneaker.
“No time to start gagging now. We need to find a map. Won’t do to get lost in those tunnels down there,” Logan grunted grasping her elbow and dragging her in to the office after him.
To their relief there were no bodies inside of the tiny tin shack, but it was hot as an oven. Rank, thick and humid air wrapped around the like a blanket when they rummaged through closets and drawers in their search of the map.
“What’s that noise?” The girl asked, drawing his attention to strange sound that echoed from a filing cabinet in the corner of the shack. Like sand falling on steel, small hissing and scraping, sounding endlessly.
“Don’t know. Lets check it out…” He reached for the top drawer. The girl grasped his wrist.
“Don’t!”
“Hell, it’s the only place we haven’t looked for yet. We need that map, and some flashlights wouldn’t hurt either.” He shook off her hand and pulled the drawer open. And found himself wishing he had listened the girl.
The drawer was filled with spiders, scorpions and snakes. They started swarming out from the metal box they had been trapped in, crawling over his arms, down his torso, some of them slipping under his clothes. He shivered and pushed his hand past the squirming mass, feeling around the drawer. Aside from snakes and bugs it was empty.
“Let’s try another… Hey! Marie? Kid?” The girl had disappeared.
“Marie? I swear the God I’ll spank your ass black and blue if you don’t answer right now!” He shouted stomping towards the door of the shack.
“I hate spiders. I hate scorpions. And hey, guess what? I hate sna…” Her sentence was cut to half. Logan managed to catch a glimpse of her being dragged behind the shack, screaming and kicking, struggling for her life. He sprinted after her.
Her captor was possessing supernatural strength and speed. The first opening of the mine loomed several meters away from the shack, but when Logan got there, both Marie and her captor were vanished. Disappeared to thin air. And he could have sworn he could smell professor Xavier’s cologne in the air, mingling with Marie’s fear. Both scents were too weak, and disappeared altogether when he tried to track them deeper in to the mine. He had to back out before he got lost in the dark tunnels.
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