It started to rain. Again. He hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands in to his pockets. Lowered his head and stole a glimpse from the girl that was trudging alongside him through the deserted city. She was shivering. They’d have to find a shelter soon. He had already given her his jacket several hours ago when first drops of rain had fallen.
“Holding up there, kid?” He asked. She jolted as if he had slapped her instead, and for a moment her eyes darted wildly back and forth, as if she had just woken up. Then her feverish gaze landed on him.
“Just peachy…” She huffed, then a fit of coughs nearly toppled her over and they had to stop so that she could support herself against a signpost.
“Come on. It says no parking here,” he grunted and nudged her shoulder. She let out a watery chuckle.
“You know… Your jokes really suck…” She muttered, spat on the sidewalk and for a moment looked as if she was going to collapse right then and there.
“You didn’t tag along because of my dazzling sense of comedy.”
“I guess not…” She hissed.
For a while they walked in silence. Storm was gathering more power, and rain was coming down in turn water and in turn half frozen slush of ice and snow.
“What does your sniffer say about that one?” The girl asked, pointing towards rather classy looking hotel. Waldorf Astoria was written above the grand entrance with tall, decorative golden letters.
“I don’t care what my sniffer has to say. We have to get you someplace warm and dry before you get pneumonia or something…”
The lobby was wide and spacious. Place looked like a royal palace. Chandeliers hanging from arched ceilings, gold and velvet coating every surface that wasn’t polished, dark wood. Floors were covered with thick, plush carpets and on some areas left bare to reveal pristine, gleaming marble.
“It doesn’t smell bad in here. But we better be careful still. Stay close,” he said and urged the girl towards wide set of stairs at the south end of the lobby. She threw a longing glance towards a row of elevators on the opposite wall.
“Death traps. This place has been deserted probably from the beginning. There’s no way we’re getting in to them…” He grunted. Then crouched slightly and scooped the girl up on his arms. She squeaked from surprise.
“I’ll carry you over the threshold, darling, but don’t go expecting anything because of it.”
“Regular joker strikes again…”
“That’s mister Regular joker to you, missy.”
He had to stop at the fifth floor to take a breather. The girl weighed next to nothing, but her weigh added with the weight of the metal coating his bones and coupled with the fact that he had last slept and eaten almost a week ago we’re almost big enough reason to bring him to his knees. He laid the girl on to a conveniently placed couch that stood on the corridor, and sat on the floor, leaning his back against the wall and closed his eyes, trying to steady his breathing.
“Where are we going anyway? To the moon?” The girl asked.
“Can’t get that far… Seventeenth floor is as high as we can get…”
“But why there? At this moment I’d settle for maid’s closet, you don’t have to haul me to a suite or…”
“I’m sure we can find a suitable closet for you from the top floor… But I want to get as high as possible. We might have to stay here for a while. At least until you get better. The less we leave traces of ourselves to the lower floors, the less chance we have to bump in to disturbance.”
“Oh.”
Disturbance was just fancy way of saying that he preferred her company over any other potential survivor. Most likely because everybody else he had encountered so far had been in constant state shock or in some other way messed up from the head. She was just hungry and sick.
“Home, suite home!” He huffed and kicked open a door revealing a lavishly furnished living room. She could feel his muscles trembling from the strain.
“You can put me down already,” she said. He let her feet slide to the floor and made sure that she was able to stand on her own before he let go of her.
“Do you think you can manage on your own for a while?” He asked.
“Why? Are you leaving?” She asked worried.
“I’m going to raid the kitchen. Can’t promise you anything fresh, but I’m sure they have tons of canned and dried food. And I was going to try and see if I can find the pharmacist. We have to get some decent meds in to you before that flu turns in to something real nasty.”
She flopped on to a couch. Rain was pelting against the window behind green velvet curtains. Logan had left after he had made sure that she locked the door behind him. He would have smelled if anybody else was up here, but it was better to play safely than end up dead just because you were too lazy or careless. Or end up even in to something worse than to the hands of a murderer. She shivered when events of the past two weeks finally started to dig in.
It had been a perfectly normal day. Warm weather, sun was shining and birds were chirping, and she had been trying to decide whether she should go to the beach with the rest of the students. After all it had been the first day of summer holiday. And first time she could follow the other kids to the activities that included bare skin. She was a mutant. From her birth her skin had been lethal to touch. Her mother had nearly died giving birth to her. Needless to say, her parent’s had put her up for adoption quickly after it became apparent that her poisonous skin wasn’t some minor complication that could have been corrected with western medicine. Professor Xavier, known mutant and spokesperson of his kind had adopted her and raised her as his daughter. Actually she had been everybody’s daughter. Xavier had been the headmaster of a school meant for mutants and every teacher and student had treated her as part of their rather extended family from the first day to that last, awful night.
She closed her eyes. The professor. Scott. Jean. Ororo. Beast. Kurt. All gone. Gone just like ninety nine percent of the world’s population.
After it was over and all that were left were abandoned buildings and empty roads she had gathered what little she could carry. She had been planning to go and see if there was anybody else left. She hadn’t gotten far when first of the survivors had found her. They had taken her belongings. She had managed to escape with her life only because the group of five men and few women had been too busy fighting over her suitcase to pay any attention to her.
Next group she had encountered had been perhaps even worse. A family. A mother, two children, and a father who guarded his loved ones with a shotgun, threatening to shoot her if she got too close of them. They were sane, but afraid that she might be one of the insane ones. She had left before the father lost his patience.
At the end of that day she had been tired and lost. At the end of the second day she was starving for real food. And at the end of the first week she had been weak as a new born kitten, ready to topple over from the smallest gush of wind, when two men had ambushed her. They would have probably either raped or eaten her if the luck hadn’t been on her side.
First she was been getting mauled by heavy ox of a man that smelled of sweat, dirt and cheap liquor, man’s hands tearing her clothes and his teeth lodged deeply in to her shoulder, his breath fanning over her neck with raspy murmur. Then men, the one on top of her and the other that had been holding her legs were gone, and Logan had been standing there, full moon behind his back casting something akin of a silvery halo around him. Logan. Or Wolverine. Of course she had seen him several times before; he was a regular guest at Xavier’s because of his position as an X-man. Most of the kids had been afraid of him. Most of the older girls had had a crush on him. And she?
She really didn’t know what to think of him.
She had fallen asleep when knock on the door woke her. For a moment she didn’t remember where she was. Then it all came rushing back. She rose to her wobbly feet.
“Who’s there?” She shouted through the door.
“Room service. Open the door, kid.” She sighed from relief when Logan’s voice came through and hurried to open the door. He was standing in the corridor next to something that looked like an extremely large kettle. It was huge. And filled to the brim with various items he had collected.
“Move. I need to get this inside,” Logan said, grabbing the brim of the large metal container and started to drag it along the floor.
“You didn’t carry that from downstairs!”
“I didn’t. Pushed it in to the elevator and took the stairs myself. At least we know now that they’re working. We have to barricade that door…” Logan grunted when the container stood in the middle of the suite. He walked to the door, closed and locked it. Then dragged a heavy drawer in front of it.
“That should hold for a while if anybody tries to get in.”
She was already delving in to the container. Food, clothes, medicine, booze, cigars… It was a regular treasure chest. And Logan tsked, grabbed her shoulders and steered her back to the sofa. Then he started emptying the container, strengthening the improvised barrier in front of the door with canned food and various other items. When the container was empty he dragged it in front of the fireplace.
“What are you planning to do now?” She asked.
“I don’t know about you, but I could really use a bath.”
“Uh… I’m quite sure that a suite of this size has a bathroom for that…”
“And cold water. I’m going to light a fire and warm the water in this,” Logan said, clapping the side of the container with his palm. It let out a hollow echo.
“What is it?” She asked.
“A kettle. Found it from the kitchen. I think they used to cook potatoes in it. You’ll probably fit in there just fine. I’ll warm enough water for both this and to the bathtub. You can soak in here. When this is next to the fire the water will stay warm longer.”
She had already fallen asleep again when Logan woke her up. Fire was crackling in the fireplace, and dance of the flames reflected from the shiny surface of the kettle.
“There’s soap and shampoo on the mantel. I brought you a towel, nightgown and a bathrobe. Do you need anything else?” Logan asked. She shook her head.
“Fine. I’ll be in the bathroom. If you need anything just give me a shout.”
She started to undress when Logan suddenly opened the bathroom door.
“Don’t need anything for the next half an hour. Okay, kid?”
“I won’t. Enjoy your bath.”
He certainly was going to enjoy. For her this all had started mere two weeks ago. He had been living this nightmare for the past six months already, searching for clues, grasping straws, trying desperately to undo what had been done. In the end he and Xavier both had had to face the facts. World was ending and there was exactly jack shit they could do to prevent it.
He peeled off his tattered and soaked clothes and threw them on the floor. Then, after brief consideration he pushed the door of the bathroom slightly open and kicked the reeking pile of cotton and denim out before closing the door again and stepping in to the tub.
He lowered himself in to the water carefully, groaning from the relief when the water that he had left nearly boiling started to work on his bunched and knotted muscles, opened miniscule clotted up veins and relaxed tendons and joints. It felt entirely too good, and after a moment he was almost asleep, his head resting against the brim of the tub. He hooked his hands over the brim as well to prevent him from drowning and let his eyes slide shut. He could afford a brief nap.
His mind drifted off to the girl that was currently bathing in the living room. Like a giant potato in that fucking kettle, he noted slightly amused. Marie. Or Rogue like everybody else at the Xavier’s had used to call her. He had a vague memory of her from several years past. Small girl, not much older than two years, and Xavier had been calling her his daughter. Marie had been staring at him with bright, brown eyes from behind her ‘father’s’ wheelchair until Ororo had stormed in and snatched her, admonishing her gently because she wasn’t supposed to be with her daddy when her daddy had important visitors.
What were the odds that she had survived when everybody else from around her had disappeared and perished? From slim to none. Her survival only had raised his interest, and now that it started to look like she’d beat a bug that had been grown in a lab somewhere, intended to erase the mutant race from earth like it was just a common flu, he was definitely interested.
Bugs. Disappearing population. End of the world. Day after day rain and shit and ice and snow. He started to drift off, sliding lower in the tub until his nose was only barely above the surface, his jaw resting against his chest.
He was asleep.
For an entire five minutes he was blessedly unaware of everything and anything around him. Then his head drooped lower and he snorted a great deal of water in to his lungs, and the world returned when he bolted up, coughing and gagging. And there was a knock on the door.
“Half an hour over already?” He asked.
“Two hours already. Did you drown in there or something?” Marie asked without opening the door.
“Nope… No such luck.” Two hours? He had been more tired than he thought was possible. No wonder the previously warm water actually felt cold now. No wonder his fingers and toes were all wrinkled. He grabbed a bar of soap and washed himself, then rinsed off quickly and wrapped a fluffy bathrobe over his shoulders. Fluffy and pink. But it was miles better than the clothes he had worn earlier. The clothes he had worn for the past month in fact. He’d have to burn them. There was no way in hell he’d be putting them back on, not even if he had lye where to soak them a bit before.
“Are you decent out there?” He asked before opening the door. He heard Marie giggling. Well, that was a good sign.
“As decent as I can be… I found the chocolate. Thank you.”
“And I trust you found your meds as well?” He asked, stepping in to the room.
“Found them. Took one, then ate some bread and… Uh, I think it was canned ham… Before I started stuffing myself with candy.”
She was sitting on the sofa, a huge box of chocolates balanced over her thighs, another already empty box at her feet and her lips smeared with chocolate. There was a small smudge of it on the tip of her nose as well. She was high from the sugar, and not as feverish anymore as she had been earlier.
“You want some?” She asked, holding the box out for him. He shook his head and reached for a mini-sized bottle of whiskey from the mini-bar.
“So… What are we going to do next?” Marie asked, still munching chocolate. Logan emptied the whiskey and thought about an appropriate answer while it trickled down his throat. Shrugged his shoulders.
“I haven’t really thought about it. All my plans concerning the future went down to drain when the shit hit the fan. We… Xavier and I… We spoke about this often. But always, in every fucking scenario it wasn’t this bad.”
“How bad?”
“It looked pretty fucking grim, but only for us. Only for mutants. And Xavier had his contacts. They were already developing a vaccine. Nobody counted in fucking techno-mages. They were… They were something you could find from those games kids played in the internet, not a real thing.”
Techno-mages. As if the Legacy hadn’t been bad enough, it had attacked mutants and humans alike, finishing off almost forty percent of the world’s population in one week. After that the real Hell had been unleashed. Strange portals had started to appear to the regions where majority of the Legacy survivors lived. And one by one people were drawn in to those portals, through their shimmering surface in to the great unknown. And there were people able to create those portals, walking on the earth like the proverbial four horsemen. Drawing power from all the possible outlets, electric lines and power stations and throwing portals at unsuspecting men, women and children until there was nobody left.
“You have seen one?” She asked. He nodded. He had seen one, up, close and personal. And had managed to introduce it to the business end of his claws just in time before it threw a portal at him.
“What did it look like?”
“Nothing much. A man in a suit. May have been an Armani… Something expensive anyway. Just the kind of guy you would expect to see at Wall Street, with a briefcase and a laptop. Only thing that gave it away were the eyes. They were all silver. After I killed it I noticed that there had grown a cord between him and his laptop. He wasn’t just holding it; wires grew from his fingertips and went through the screen of the laptop… And it was screaming when I stabbed it.”
“The man was screaming?”
“No. The computer. But enough of these ghost stories for now. Time to go to sleep.”
“But I have to brush my teeth and…”
“Consider that one of your smallest problems. And it’s solved. Here,” Logan said, reaching to the pile of goods he had scavenged from the lower floors and handed her a toothbrush and paste.
While she brushed her teeth Logan entertained himself by slugging back more of the miniature-sized bottles of booze. His mutation ate away the alcohol before he managed to get even dizzy, but he had long ago learned to take his kicks from where he could get them, and the burn of the liquor as it trickled down his throat was almost pleasurable experience enough if he swallowed really carefully. Or if he tilted is head back and didn’t swallow at all, just let it slide down slowly, very, very slowly… And why the hell was the chandelier above his head swinging? Almost as if there was somebody walking up on the roof and steps made the whole thingamajick tremble and…
“Fuck!”
He rolled off from the couch just in time to avoid the heavy chandelier as it fell. One minute it hung up there, trembling and swaying lightly, then suddenly it was missing some vital parts, like the whole fucking roof from above it, and it came down, decorative, golden rods which held the crystals on it piercing the couch right where he sat just half a second earlier.
Noise alerted Marie who bolted out from the bathroom, her lips smeared with toothpaste, brush sticking out from the corner of her mouth and her eyes wide as saucers.
“Grab some clothes! Warm clothes! Quickly!” Logan was already pulling on jeans and shrugged on a shirt, started gathering medicine and food to a small knapsack.
“Hurry!” She had found some clothes, but he wasn’t apparently going to wait that she got dressed. He had already moved the rickety barricade and opened the door. He was standing at the doorstep, his eyes fixed to the roof, which was… Which was… There was something wrong with it, but it took her almost five minutes and several flights of stairs to comprehend that the whole roof from the room that Logan had chosen for them had somehow vanished to thin air.
“Logan! Logan, wait! What’s going on?” She tried to make him to slow down, but Logan was having none of that. His hold from around her wrist held and he was practically dragging her down.
“”What happened?” She huffed when he finally stopped for a short breather.
“Techno-mages. It was a portal. I don’t know if they just wanted to take a look at what those suites look like or are they after us. I hope it was just curiosity. If it wasn’t…”
“We’re screwed?”
“Exactly. Ready to get going again?”
Question was apparently rhetorical in nature. She was about to open her mouth to answer when they heard footsteps from somewhere above them, and before she even realized Logan had yanked her after him again.
They practically flew down the stairs. She stumbled twice but managed to find her balance. Logan wasn’t as lucky. At the first landing he fell and rolled down the last steps. And now she could hear more footsteps, approaching rapidly from above. She could see a pair of sneakers, attached to jeans-clad feet.
“I don’t think…” She started, frozen to the spot, chant ‘No Armani, No Armani, No Armani’ running through her head when Logan scrambled back up, grabbed her arm and threw her through the lobby towards the entrance/exit.
She rolled over the floor until a large marble column stopped her rather painfully. She turned to look at Logan who was running towards her and shouting, no, screaming for her to get the fuck out, and there was something round and silvery spreading behind him, like a mirror, except this mirror was growing silvery tentacles that slithered over the floor, walls and roof at alarming pace…
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Story Notes:
Heh. I just love it when I managed to delete a whole story when I'm trying to edit it.