“Do you believe in ghosts?” Marie whispered.
“I haven’t before, but it’s beginning to feel like a good idea to revise my beliefs...” Logan huffed.
“This is creepy,” Marie muttered, trying to act bravely while standing behind his back and flinching every time he moved or slight breeze rustled debris on the ground.
“Tell me about it. I can’t smell a fucking thing. Those screams we heard earlier... I was expecting to find the screamer torn in pieces, but I can smell only us.”
They had searched the whole village with no results. Marie had seen something to move in the shadows behind the grocery store but whatever it had been it was as good as gone now. It had left no traces and Logan was convinced that her imagination had just played a dirty trick on her. Either that or the village was haunted. He rather chose to believe to the former option than the latter.
“We haven’t checked the church yet,” Marie reminded him when he was about to turn back.
“Well, it can’t hurt to look. But when I was here with Scooter we checked it and the doors were locked,” he said. They approached the small building slowly. There was every possibility that the screamer, whatever it had been, was hiding behind the sturdy doors.
“We are morons,” Logan snorted, reaching for the door handle.
“Speak for yourself, mister... Why?” Marie asked, then held her breath as he ever so carefully nudged the handle. It refused to budge.
“We should get back to Jean and Scott. We can optimize the search area of the radar. It’ll pick up anything and everything from ten mile radius. If those screams were real and the screamer is still around we will find it easier that way.”
“That’s a good idea. But while we’re here, do we have time to go shopping?” Marie asked somewhat relieved.
“Shopping?” Logan asked.
“Well, it’s nice to eat roasted food every once and a while, but I saw a portable stove in the grocery store when I was here with Jean. We tried to take it with us, but the gas tank was too heavy to lift for us.”
“And she didn’t use her powers to levitate it because?”
“Well, we were a bit tipsy and everything...”
“Being a bit tipsy and being utterly drunk as a skunk are two different conditions, kid.”
“Come on! Be a man!”
“I am. It doesn’t involve hauling a huge-ass gas tanks through a fucking forest so that you could cook something because you’re bored of eating roasted food.”
“You’re a wuss.”
“Yeah. And wise enough to come back later and find some sort of cart so I can drag your loot home. Right now we have more important things to do. We have to check out that screamer. At best it’s just some fucking weird bird. At worst... Who the hell knows what it is...”
He tried to remember when it had happened. When exactly had Marie earned the right to get on his nerves and to live and tell the tale of it? He couldn’t remember. Actually it was impossible to imagine her in any other way. Perhaps it had all started in his camper. The one and only vehicle he remembered with some degree of fondness. It had been a piece of shit. Marie had called him for it. At the time he had let it slide. She had been starving. She would have died had he thrown her on to the road. And did it really matter when it had happened? She had a permanent get out of jail free –card which she used surprisingly sparsely.
They were halfway through the forest when the scream pierced the air again. Only now it wounded like it came from the lumber mill.
“Shit! It crept around us!” Logan bolted forward, tripping over a thick root and landing face first on to the narrow path.
“And now you decide to take a nap? Hurry up! I don’t want to miss all the action!” Marie hollered sprinting past him in her haste to reach the screamer. Logan rose on his feet and shook off bits of moss and dry leaves, his face turning to a grimace.
“Fuck... Kid! Wait up! You don’t know what we’re dealing with!”
She was faster than him, but he knew for a fact that he won her in endurance. If she kept her pace up, she’d be no use in battle when she reached the lumber mill. He had tried to warn her before. One day her reckless nature would get her in to serious trouble. He tried to keep up steady pace, but then the scream echoed again and all his plans of careful and well planned approach flew to hell. This time he could identify the screamer. It was Marie.
He could see the hulking figure of the lumber mill from amidst the trees. Marie was screaming again, calling him, hollering his name from the top of her lungs. Another voice soon joined to those screams. Scott. And Scott wasn’t calling him. He could only barely distinguish the words.
“Jean! Oh, God.... Jean!”
The sight that greeted Logan when he emerged from the woods stopped him dead on his tracks. There was a lump on the ground. Red lump. The same colour as Jean’s shirt –lump. That lump wasn’t moving, no matter how harshly Scott was poking it. That lump wasn’t moving no matter how loud Marie cried and pleaded. Jean wasn’t moving.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000