Red America, Chapter One:
Land Of The Free
Jim Logan heard the curfew sirens going off and looked up from the small fire he was building in the centre of the floor. The ruined building he was sheltered in was enough to shield him from prying eyes, but it also gave him a limited view of the outside world, which annoyed him. Although he had an excellent overall sense of the situation around him thanks to his other four senses, he didn't like not being able to look at what was going on without the risk of getting a bullet from an assault rifle between the eyes.
Russkies are callin' curfew early tonight, he thought sourly. Wonder what lit a fire under their asses today… It could be any one of a thousand different things, he reflected – rebel attacks on Soviet convoys in Montana, perhaps, or shortages of food for citizens, or a lack of adequate winter clothing for the Soviet armed forces. Risking a glance out of one of the shattered windows, Logan looked out and saw citizens being herded out of the streets by angry-looking Russian soldiers, and he also saw a lot of armour, tanks and half-tracks packing serious armament, trundling up the main roads that led to most of Brooklyn. The tarmac was pretty mashed up, thanks to the dozens of rebel bombs that had gone off in this neighbourhood, but the Soviet tanks simply ground it up like mincemeat, flattening it beneath their super-heavy treads. Logan suppressed a smile at that – in his experience, the Ivans didn't get out that much armour unless the rebels had done something pretty significant. Of course, so many tanks meant that the Reds were going to put a hurting on some poor bastard, regardless of whether or not he was a resistance fighter, so Logan was in two minds about whether or not he was truly pleased about the fact that the Russians were making such a public show of force.
He looked up at the ragged Stars and Stripes on the wall (which had been set there by the other members of the resistance cell who shared this rat-hole with Logan, despite the fact that to show the flag so obviously was punishable by execution. But then again, Logan supposed, in this day and age, "give me liberty or give me death" had become even more relevant), and smiled roughly. "Looks like it's gonna be a big day tomorrow," he said, before he used the gold-plated lighter he'd stolen from the body of a Russian soldier to ignite the small pile of smashed chair legs and other kindling in front of him. He warmed his hands against the fire's nascent glow, and decided to try and keep his head down for the moment.
America had been this way for years now. During World War Two, when Logan had been a member of the Canadian army, he had watched with horror as the Russians dropped an enormous hydrogen bomb on the shattered city of Berlin, bringing the war in Europe to a horrendous and bloody end. And that was only the start – from there, America was powerless to stop the Communist bloc engulfing Europe, with Britain losing its independence only a few years after the war. The United Kingdom had been the last country in Europe to be free of Communist influence, and with its staunchest ally in that part of the world now a one-party state, America had to withdraw in on itself, becoming technologically-sluggish and lagging behind the Soviets' superior military capability. It was powerless to prevent Castro inviting the USSR to place mid-range nuclear missiles on Cuba, or to prevent the Communist victory in Mexico – and when the Soviets invaded Canada, it could do nothing to prevent itself from becoming encircled by the world's only superpower.
Logan had escaped Canada then, hoping that the USA would make a pre-emptive stand of some kind against its predicament, but his hopes had been unfounded. Three years later, the Soviet navy had surfaced in New York harbour after low-flying drones had scouted out the landscape (drones which had been stupidly dismissed as weather balloons by a sceptical American government), and Soviet troops had poured across the Canadian border and into New York City in a standard, but effective pincer movement. And now the situation had disintegrated into this – the Soviets' dictatorial rule over the United States had virtually crushed all resistance, bar a hardcore cadre of battle-hardened fighters determined to throw out the oppressors once and for all.
Jim Logan was one of those men, and he was currently part of a resistance cell that was sheltering in New York. With his fifty years of experience, Logan knew how to procure arms and ammunition – and despite the scars that criss-crossed his body like train tracks, and the few stray specks of grey in his hair, Logan could still join in with his younger counterparts' missions. The strange bone claws that he'd discovered in his hands helped with that – he had no idea how he'd survived so long, either, but as long as he could make his mark on the Russkies, Logan didn't much care.
A slight noise at the smashed doorway made Logan look up suddenly, those same claws sliding from between his knuckles in the blink of an eye, and a bestial growl issuing from between his lips. "Password," he snarled.
"You're an asshole, Logan, you know that?" said the man at the door, who was carrying several bloodstained Soviet Army rifles over his shoulder, along with a few boxes of ammunition. He moved over to where the fire was just beginning to crackle into more vigorous life, and sat down across from Logan in order to warm his hands. Logan sprang over the flames in the blink of an eye, and extended the claws from his right fist so that they pricked the other man's throat.
"Give me the password, you little punk," he said, his voice deathly cold, "or I swear I'll cut your fucking throat out."
Terror-scent wafted up from the other man, pleasing Logan inwardly, and he said "Okay, Logan… 'Yankees'. That okay by you?" Logan nodded, and let him sit back up, withdrawing the claws back into his hand as he did so.
"Welcome back, Scott," he said, letting the other man catch his breath. The guy's eyes were a weird red colour, which creeped Logan out every time he looked at him, but other than that, he was an okay guy, and had pulled Logan's fat out of the fire more than once. "What's the word?"
"Russkies are moving so much armour around out there that we can't get a fix on any viable targets," Scott said, sounding sullenly disappointed. "We lost Parker out there today. The Ivans shot him in the face when they caught him – splashed his brains all over Central Park." Scott punched the ground then, tears welling from his eyes as he remembered the incident. "Stupid fucking idiot. He knew what they'd do to him, ever since the Bronx bombs – and he let them catch him anyway." He rubbed at his face tiredly. "Dammit, I should've expected this. Guy never was the same after the bastards shot his aunt."
Logan nodded silently. Parker had had a thousand-yard stare ever since his old aunt had been murdered on national TV, after he'd escaped the Soviets following the crippling of an army base in the Bronx. It had been, he thought, only a matter of time before Parker made one dumb mistake too many. Guess tonight was the night, he thought sourly, before reaching over to a large wooden box and fishing out a bottle of room-temperature beer (which actually made it pretty cold). Holding it by its long neck, he offered it to Scott. "Want a beer?" he asked, in such a way as to try and distract the younger man from what had happened earlier. Nodding in gratitude, Scott took it and pulled the metal lid off with his teeth, spitting the cap into a knot of rats in the corner. They scattered, squeaking indignantly, drawing a distasteful sneer from Scott as one of them ran towards him. He shooed it away, kicking at it with one hobnailed boot.
"Damned rats," he muttered, grimacing, and taking a generous swig of his beer. He swallowed it after savouring its flavour for a second or so, and then said "Some others are on their way – they'll be here in about half an hour."
"Sounds like we're gonna have ourselves a nice little party," Logan said, using one bony claw to pop the cap off the bottle of beer he'd found for himself, before taking a thoughtful measure from it. "You reckon the Reds won't be able to trace 'em?"
Scott shook his head. "Nah," he said, belching. "Call it intuition, but I'm thinking the Reds won't be able to find them at all." Then his dour expression broke into an excited grin, and he continued "Seems like Jamie found a kid in Chicago who could jump right through walls – he said her name was Katie, or something. The underground brought her here last night to help us out. Looks like we found ourselves a secret weapon, chief."
"Is that right?" Logan snorted, and extended the claws on his right hand. "Well, what am I, kid? Chopped liver?"
"Yeah, well, no offence, guy, but you're not exactly a spring chicken any more –" Scott began, before Logan popped a single claw and sliced the neck of his beer bottle in half in the blink of an eye, causing the rest of the bottle to fall to the floor and shatter. Stale-smelling alcohol splashed all over Scott's trousers, making him curse. Then he noticed Logan's self-satisfied smirk, and said "All right, I take it back. Now get me another beer before I tell the Russkies where your favourite bar is."
Knowing that the younger man was serious – and even more importantly, knowing what the Russians would do if they found the speakeasy that he frequented as often as he could – Logan tossed Scott another beer without another word. Scott caught it one-handed, and opened it as quickly as he had the first, taking a mouthful and swilling it around for a second or two before letting it slide down his throat.
Suddenly, there was a commotion at the doorway, and several dirty, exhausted people hammered on the smashed door in order to ask permission to enter. Logan shouted his assent and then went through the same procedure that he'd been through with Scott with each of the new arrivals. None of them made the kind of fuss that Scott had – mostly because they'd known Logan slightly longer, and had learned not to get him annoyed. One of them, a rangy young man with floppy brown hair and a naturally cheerful face smeared with camouflage paint said "Evening, gents. When's room service getting here?" He slapped the wall with his hand, and an exact duplicate appeared from thin air, which then replicated itself, and so on until five identical men stood in the room where only one had been before.
Logan snorted. Jamie Madrox wasn't exactly known for keeping his strange gift to himself – no matter how many of him there happened to be at any one time. Still, he was glad to have the kid around, because Jamie did often provide a means of making bad situations seem better than they were. "Looks like they already did," he replied, to which the five Jamies all took a slight bow, an expansive grin spreading across all five faces, before one particular Jamie reabsorbed all the others and then stood alone once again. Logan noticed that in the knot of freedom fighters (which was evenly split between men and women) behind Madrox was a young girl, who couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen. Her dark chestnut hair was cut close to her scalp in an almost military style. A purple, un-patterned bandanna was tied around her brow, and just underneath the lower edge of the ragged t-shirt she wore, Logan could see that she had a curling, lengthy tattoo of a Chinese dragon on her stomach, her navel decorated with a single piercing. He pushed himself to his feet and walked towards the stony-eyed young lady, before sticking out a hand and saying "Welcome to the New York resistance, kid. My name's Jim Logan. You must be Katie."
"Kitty," the girl said firmly, taking Logan's hand and squeezing it with a grip that surprised him with its strength. "My name's Kitty." She looked around the room for a moment, sizing up the accommodation – such as it was – and then said "Don't suppose you got a cigarette? Only I ran out before we came out here, and –"
"Relax, kid. Relax." Logan walked over to where he'd got the beers from and put his hand into another box, drawing out a slightly dirty pack of contraband American-made cigarettes and throwing them to the girl. She caught the pack without even looking, a slow smile of relief spreading across her face. "There you go." Kitty took a long cigarette out of the pack, put it between her lips, and ignited an ornate lighter before taking a grateful drag.
Blowing out a long stream of blue smoke, she said "So what can I do for you? Resistance out west had me stealing stuff from the Ivans' weapons depots in Chicago, but I don't think you want me doing something so… passive, do you?" She raised her cigarette to her lips again and inhaled once more, causing the grey tip to glow orange for a moment or so. "So spill it."
"What if we were goin' to ask you to do that, kid?" Logan asked, suddenly curious about this obviously battle-hardened girl. He could smell the faint residual odour of gun oil and plastic explosive on her, and it intrigued him a great deal.
"I'd do it," Kitty replied. "Anything that hurts the Reds is good enough for me – but I want something a little more… exciting. Can I seduce one of the regional governors?" An impish grin spread across her pretty face at that, and she laughed. "Not like I haven't had experience in that, after all. Plenty of Russkie soldiers have gone out with a smile on their faces, if you know what I mean… before I started cutting, anyway." From a bandolier strung around her hips she produced a small switchblade, extending the blade in the blink of an eye by pressing the small stud on the handle's side, and twirled the weapon around expertly before hurling it at the opposite wall. The blade speared a rat as it hurtled towards the chipped plaster, which twitched and thrashed in its death throes. Without bothering to look at what she'd done, Kitty drew another knife, a long-bladed dagger this time, flicked some ash into the heart of the fire and gave Logan a calm, collected look. "So what do you need me for?"
"Sorry, kid," Scott said, looking away from the rat's corpse distastefully. "Nothing that exciting."
"Well, don't keep a girl waiting," Kitty replied, extracting some dirt from under her fingertips with the point of her knife. "Give me an idea of what you want from me."
"We need you to keep our guys company while they hit the Soviets' bases," Scott explained, spreading his hands expansively. "You'll be their escape hatch – you can walk through walls, so you're going to help our guys do the same. Understand?"
"Completely." Kitty shrugged, dropping her cigarette to the floor and crushing it out with the toe of her boot. "You're the boss, man."
"Good. I'd hate to think I couldn't count on you in a crisis," Scott told her, sounding all business (not for the first time, Logan noted. Scott seemed a natural in the leadership role, as if he'd been born for it), before he turned to the rest of the resistance cell and said "Anybody else got anything to say before we head back to base?" One of the women fighters, a slender redhead with piercing green eyes, raised her hand from the barrel of the assault rifle slung over her shoulder. Scott nodded to her in acknowledgement. "What is it, Mary Jane?"
Mary Jane cleared her throat before she produced a small slip of paper from a pocket on her fatigues, which was stained here and there with long brown streaks of blood. "I found this on the body of one of the Red soldiers," she said in a voice that seemed totally unsuited to her grimy, downtrodden exterior. "It looks like… orders for something, I think. Then again, might just be a love letter from the guy's Babushka back home." She shook her head, and her brows crumpled in frustration. "I never was much good at reading Russkie," she said, handing the paper to Logan. "Here. See if you can make any sense of it."
Logan took the paper and scanned it with one swift glance. It wasn't orders, and it sure as hell wasn't a love letter, but it was definitely plans for something or other. Precisely what, he couldn't say, but it did partially explain the movement of all the Soviet armour outside. The neighbourhood was due for "cleansing", so the paper said, and that was evidently why they were massing so much heavy gear here. "We gotta get outta here," he said quickly. "They're gonna bomb this neighbourhood to pieces."
Another of the female freedom fighters, a nimble, athletic blonde, said "They couldn't do that this quickly, could they?" Her gloved hands fidgeted anxiously as she spoke – a leftover symptom of her captivity in the local Russian gulag – and she kept adjusting the sunglasses that hung from a cord around her neck, which were the last remnants she had of her former life as a music sensation. "I mean, we're safe here for a day, right?"
"I've seen 'em turn places to dust an' bones in a day, kid," Logan snorted, before he gestured out of the cracked windows at the rumble of tank treads. "You think those things out there are loaded with blanks? If we stay here, they'll find us –"
"I'm not going back in that prison," the woman stated, shaking her head almost frantically. "I can't. You can't let them take me." Scott stepped forwards then and took her hands in his, locking his red-eyed gaze with hers.
"Alison," he said quietly. "Alison, listen to me. I promise you're not going to go back in that prison. You have my word on that."
"You promise?" Alison said, uncertainly, as she tried to get her breathing to slow down to somewhere approaching normal.
"Cross my heart," Scott replied, marking a cross over his chest, before kissing her tenderly on the mouth.
And it was then that the world unravelled, blooming into bright white noise and jagged, rough-edged pain.
Something ripped through the building from outside, causing the old walls to crumble into fragments almost instantly. People screamed as bricks and mortar came down on top of them, killing some and burying others, and leaving still more stunned and dazed. Logan saw Scott stumble and fall unconscious, his ears and nose trickling blood, and he knew that he was going to have to get out of here and bring help from somewhere else. He couldn't tell exactly what had hit them, but he knew it couldn't have been a shell, because he could smell no trace of ozone or gunpowder. As he pushed himself out of a pile of old bricks and tried to stand, a jagged cut closing rapidly on his brow, he saw what it was that had opened up the hideout like a side of beef.
In front of him, clad in a standard Red Army uniform, was a huge, imposing giant of a man – only it seemed that it wasn't a man at all, but rather a giant metal statue given life. Furious at the death and injury (serious or otherwise) of so many of his comrades, Logan threw himself at the giant, who simply endured the frenzied, enraged slashing of Logan's claws with nothing but puzzlement before grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and heaving him off his feet. "Greetings, tovarisch," the man-mountain said in halting English. Evidently he was a recent draftee into the Red Army, and hadn't learned much of the language yet, before he turned away and said something in Russian to an unseen observer.
Logan turned his head to see where the soldier was looking, and he saw, emerging from the shadows outside, a statuesque woman who was wearing a uniform similar to the colossus. Her blonde hair was bound up in a tight bun and she regarded Logan with something that was one step away from bottomless contempt. He spat at her feet and snarled "You're gonna pay for this, you Russkie bitch."
The woman's cold, yet strikingly seductive violet eyes narrowed, and she backhanded him across the face with surprising force. "Talk only if I ask you to talk," she stated simply, in cultured English tones which had apparently been edged with touches of the Russian pronunciation of certain sounds, before she examined her gloved knuckles to make sure that none of Logan's blood had stained the black leather. "Now listen carefully, little man. I am Comrade-Colonel Elisabeth Braddock, and I have been put in charge of this little incursion into your rebel territory. If you co-operate with me, your people may live. If you do not, they will die, and you will watch them bleed out. Do I make myself clear?"
"Crystal," Logan said. He knew that if he seemed to co-operate now, he could buy his fellow freedom fighters time to reorganise and mount a counter-offensive.
Whether or not he survived to see it was a different matter altogether, though…