Chapter One: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know
British Columbia, Canada, Summer 1970
I: Liv
I used to be able to keep it all together, yunno.
There was the shit I saw, and the shit I did, and it never bothered me.
I always thought that I was a psychopath, like the Old Man, and boy do I hate being wrong.
Maybe I am a psychopath. Just not completely.
I'm falling apart. Goddamn doctor and his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Run a few more tests. Take these pills. You need help, or you'll end up, end up like what? Those guys just back from Nam who sit numb in front of a television washing down their Thorazine with whiskey?
But you have to do it. Think of how you're wasting your brilliant mind.
Wasting my brilliant mind. Fuck you. Thorazine won't waste my brilliant mind? The Old Man up in Arkham, he never takes his medicine. You fucks can't pull one over on Jack Napier, and you sure as fuck can't pull on over on his little girl, either.
Yeah, I got a brilliant mind. All jacked up like a Boeing 747 roaring in my ears, all the time. Jet engine mind going on and on at me.
And you just think you can make it stop?
Fuck you and your talking cure and your Thorazine. I'm going to tough this shit out, I'm just gonna live with it, and when I finally do get my shit together, I'm gonna be so goddamn diamond hard, nothing's ever going to get to me like this again.
That was the plan.
The only thing I hadn't thought of is that when you're drunk all day, every day, and you're walking on the thin edge of insanity, you don't make good decisions.
But then again, some people would say I never did.
But, yeah, things being what they are I should have never listened to Slim MacLeod. But you know me by now, I'm always thinking with the little head, not with the big head, so all I was thinking of was how Slim had a cock like a horse and we had some history and he always knew where the cheap booze was, so you bet me and him were in the old '63 Wildcat and on my way from Wayne Manor to Toronto as fast as I could make up a good lie so Bruce wouldn't worry about me.
He didn't believe me. But I think he was grateful I made the effort.
And I expect you know me well enough by now to know that if there's a way for bad luck and trouble to find me, or for me to find them, I'll do it. Me and Slim had about a week or so in TO, hanging around Kensington Market with the rest of the freaks and getting hammered and balling it up in his shitty little apartment before he painted me this beautiful picture of the Great White North in the summertime and how I had to see it.
I figured maybe I could t some peace of mind and get my head together.
That's the thing about weasels. Show me a good honest big, bad motherfucker, any day of the week and I'll show you a man you can know exactly what he's gonna do and when he's gonna do it.
But these fucking cowardly weasel bastards they always wait for you to show them a weakness, they wait until you got one leg to stand on and then they knock it out from under you, and leave you to die slowly like a dog that's been hit by a car on the side of the road.
Goddamn Silm, the motherfucker, he left me on the side of the road, way the fuck up near Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory.
After everything I did for the sunnuvabitch.
He stole three grand in cash from me, a case of Newcastle Brown, two bottles of Jack Daniels, a brick of grass, and all the clothes I had in my suitcase. The only reason I still have the car, a change of clothes, boots, a coat, my guns and my wallet and passport and shit is because I never trust a man who's crazy enough to lie down with me, and I always sleep in the locked car, and my knapsack never leaves my sight.
It's good to be paranoid. Somewhere, underneath the bad dreams and the flashbacks and the breakdowns and all this shit I don't need, I'm still me.
I'm still in here, somewhere.
Still I was broke and I might as well have been on the fucking moon. Took me a long time to make it to the next town. And after I got my shit together again, considering the circumstances, I could have gone into town and phoned Bruce and asked him to wire me some money. Or I could have pushed this button on the bracelet the Doc gave me and zapped myself to Washington, but I'll be goddamned if I have to run home to Daddy every time shit doesn't go my way.
I got myself into this bullshit, I figured, and I'll get myself out of it.
That'll give me something to do. You gotta get your sanity back real fast when you're in a life or death situation.
Funny how you can't always get what you want, but you just might find, you get what you need.
So, after I was straightened out, I got hold of the twenty American dollars stuffed into the holster in my bra, and so I got some gas and a map at a station and headed out on the road.
I didn't have a plan of how I was going to make it back to TO, put Slim on ice, then get home to New York from the fucking Yukon on twenty dollars, and I probably shouldn't have been spending any of it on booze, but when you eat something, you have to drinkm and the place had Pepsi and no Coke, so what was wrong with a beer?
It was when I was having one goddamn beer and the worst fucking sandwich I had ever choked down at some hick joint that looked like it used to be a barn that I figured out how exactly howI was going to make enough money to get back to TO and kill that son-of-a-bitch Slim MacLeod. I mean I had nothing against him splitting the States to save his ass, but he shoulda got a goddamn job in Toronto instead of a habit, then he wouldn't have been in the spot he put me in.
He's never shoulda put me in that spot.
Now he's gonna die for it, the son-of-a-bitch.
Hard.
Anyway, there I was, eating a shit sandwich and drinking some lukewarm piss that pretended to be beer when this this king-sized redneck motherfucker, or whatever they call them in Canada, he decided to show up and give me a hassle about my ensemble and my tattoos.
Son of a bitch. It's not enough for these cocksuckers to get on guys' asses about having long hair, if you're a woman and you're not wearing a pink dress and making a cake for the, barefoot in a kitchen, they can't leave you alone, either.
I warned the motherfucker to leave me alone, that I wasn't in the mood for his shit, but guys like that, they always have to press their luck.
Son of a bitch called me a pussy.
Me.
To tell you the truth, I was in just the mood to show somebody how we do things in Brooklyn, and I wanted to see if I was up to speed again, so I asked him if he wanted to take it outside.
He wasn't too fond of the idea until I told him that just because you had a pussy it didn't mean you were a pussy, except in his case.
Naturally I handed the son-of-a-bitch his ass, and two or three guys had to pull me off him so I didn't beat the dumb asshole to death. Anyway, as I was on my way back to my car, this little guy in a trucker hat gives me fifty bucks Canadian.
"What's this?" I asked.
"We had a bet going against you. We lost." He tells me.
You bet your ass I took the fifty. I marched right back into the bar and I bought a gallon jug of Yukon Jack and a case of Labatt's stout and the first decent meal I had in three days, and this one guy who didn't have the money to cover his bet paid me in a half a carton of Luckies, no filters.
I was on the road again, doing about eighty and having a beer and a smoke with Muddy Waters on the tape deck when I got the idea that if I was going to go from one-horse town to one-horse town and get drunk and fight, I might as well make money on it.
So that was how I made my way from the Yukon down to British Columbia. I'd find a place to camp where I could get the Wildcat down a trail where there was some water nearby, and I'd go to a few places around the area, a few little one horse towns, and take bets on me versus the biggest bastard they could find in a bare-knuckle fight. When I had enough money to eat, travel, smoke, fill up the tank and get some more booze, I'd move on.
But I only drank when I was travelling. When it was time to go to work, I just let it go. I gotta drink to stay sane, but do I need to be sane to camp in the woods and beat up assholes for money?
Fuck no.
I let it go. I let it all go. That whole civilisation trip, it never suited my Old Man, even before Bruce dipped him in the chemical stew, and it don't suit Liv Napier, either.
It was easy to let it all go. Everything became simple. Wake up, eat food. No food? Get food. Get gas. Get smokes. Go back to camp. Eat food. Wash clothes. Maybe read for awhile. Smoke. Think about things. Eat some more. Get ready for the fight. Get mad. Go fight. Make money. Go to sleep. Wake up. Eat food…
It feels good not to think, not to reason, not to use my big brain and my huge IQ and wash up and play nice and say please and thank you. I'm living the way some small, mean little mammal, like a badger, lives in its burrow. I come out, I forage, I kick some ass, I go back in.
Which brings me to right exactly now. I'm camped in the woods outside some little shitbox logging town, and I just had a fight last night and I'm getting ready to break camp and roll across the territory until I run out of money, again. I suppose I should be hoping to get my ass to Alberta on this wad, but you never can tell, and just right now I'm not too worried about it.
Because I could go on like this forever. It's nice here, quiet, nobody around, and today's a lovely day. Sunny. Warm. The grass under me is cool and the sun feels good on my skin.
I am naked and I am not ashamed.
Maybe I do want to get myself back to the garden.
How many more battles will I have to fight, how many more guys will I have to kill?
If I stay out here long enough, I'll bet you all those goddamn flashbacks and bad memories and the whole shebang will all just disappear.
Sure, all my good memories will go, too, but just right now, laying here naked in the grass and looking and the beautiful sun in the beautiful sky, I don't care.
Did I tell you my mind is like a jet engine, roaring and screaming and going on and on at me all the time? It never stops. Not when I'm drunk, not when I'm sleeping. Never. How many tiny discrete thoughts assail my consciousness ever moment?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
A million tiny thoughts every second, every minute a millennium, every hour an eternity.
I can't stop it and I can't stand it.
I want peace.
I'm tired of being Liv Napier, and I'm tired of being the Harlequin, and I'm tired of being a genius, and I'm tired of being a human being.
Tired, and I want peace, and my shoulder still hurts.
But the sky is so blue, the trees are so green, the water is cool and the sun is so warm.
It's a beautiful day to be a little animal in the big, wide woods.
Maybe if I stay here long enough, it'll all just go away. I'll just leave the car, let it rust, forget how to drive it. I won't think in words anymore, because I won't remember what they are. I never hunted anything for food, before, but I learned fast. I'll bet I can learn to hunt without guns.
And the clothes will rot off my back and the shoes will rot off my feet and I'll wander away from here, deeper into the woods, to be with the other animals. Quiet and peaceful and unknowing, just a happy little monkey again, laughing in the trees.
Wait a minute.
What's that noise?
It's a passing car, on the road up there.
It's a hiker on a distant trail.
It's a hunter somewhere over the hill.
It's an animal.
No. No it isn't. Those are footsteps.
Human footsteps. Coming closer and closer.
Heavy footsteps.
I'll bet it's a man.
Yeah, it's a man. I can smell him in the air.
Jesus, what am I saying I can smell him in the air? Well I've spent most of my life among men, and I've been with enough of them, I know how they walk and what they smell like, don't I?
There's a man coming down here.
Coming for me.
I don't know who he is, or what he fucking well wants and I don't have my clothes and I don't have my guns but I don't need them.
I've killed with my bare hands once before, I can do it again.
Who's that coming into my burrow?
Who dares?
If it's trouble he wants, he's going to get it.
I'll just go into the brush, and I'll wait for him.
That's what I'll do.
Yeah.
Wait.
Wait?
I think I know that smell.
Hell, I think I'd know it, anywhere…
II: Logan
Thinking about it, looking into the bottom of the rapidly emptying beer mug, Wolverine realised he'd been making some lousy decisions, lately.
First, it was probably not a good idea, stealing Cyke's car.
He was only going to take a little joyride, that was all.
Get his mind off his troubles.
Just a little joke on the kid. Bring the car back at the end of the weekend. I was just testin' the new truck out for ya, Scott. No, that ain't a dent, it's a sign of character.
Nothing else helped. Telling himself that almost every woman he ever got mixed up with died, violently, didn't help. And telling himself that Jean was just a kid and he was old enough to be her great-great fucking grandfather didn't help, and what Professor X told him about accepting things didn't help and all the goddamn booze he poured down his throat didn't help, either.
It would have helped that if at the same time that the words coming out of her mouth said 'Aw, gee, Logan, you're like a big brother to me but I'm just so in love with Scott' the way she held her body and the look in her eyes weren't saying 'disregard the words coming out of my mouth, I love you, Logan, I need you, I want you, I'm obsessed with you, I never met a man like you, you're the one I've been waiting all my life for, fuck me, fuck me now, oh please, please, please.'
Women. You could get into a lot of trouble paying attention to what they said with their walk instead of listening to their talk.
Just look what happened to Eddie Blake. Fucked up his whole life, almost killed America's Sweetheart, and then got a book written about what an asshole he was.
Then Sally forgave him.
Women.
Go figure.
Logan smiled to himself, thinking about how it was Cyke's car he took for his joyride. Still, he had never meant to take it from New York all the way to BC, that was for damn sure.
But Mel, she was different.
At least, he thought she was.
Another rule.
Don't touch the students.
Well, he never touched the students.
But Mel, she was goddamn twenty years old.
Jesus, Charlie, what do you want me to do? They're all over me. Now how did that combat move go, Mr. Logan? Was it like this?
That's not combat, baby.
And what that little girl could do to a man.
You old Canucklehead, she's a goddamn Nymph, an honest to God nymph and she looks like the girl on the "St. Pauli Girl" bottles.
What the hell did you expect?
What was it Professor X told him? About him having a weakness for a damsel in distress?
Yeah, she was a damsel in distress, alright. Nobody else could see that in Yukon Mel, but Logan could.
Distress. Giving him a wild look in those big blue eyes while she unbuckled his belt.
Almost ran the truck into a goddamn tree.
Damsel in distress, alright. She sure made him feel stupider than he'd felt in a long time.
What Nymphs have, pretty much, is the power to cloud men's minds.
Logan looked into the bottom of his glass.
Hell, all women have the power to cloud men's minds.
Hello titties and goodbye brains.
Yeah, and if I hadn't been blind, stinking, drunk for two months, I may have been thinking more clearly. That's what's clouding my mind.
That and Jeannie.
I dream of Jeannie with the long red hair.
Whiskey and women, Jesus H. Christ.
But, what was gone was gone, and Cyke's car, and the girl, and everything he had taken with him when he left except the clothes on his back and the boots on his feet and the fifty bucks he kept under the insole of the left boot were gone, too.
Slept right through it, too, woke up in the hotel room hugging the pillow.
Still, he kind of wondered if she was okay, and she had made it to Vancouver, safely.
Charlie said it was his job to protect his students, after all.
Maybe she had an explanation.
It wouldn't be the first time he walked across North America, though, and it probably wouldn't be the last.
He figured he was overdue for a vacation, anyway.
Maybe it would clear his mind.
Especially when he ran out of money.
A little man with a limp interrupted his reverie.
"Hey, shorty? You wanna get in on the action? For the fight?"
"Who the fuck are you callin' shorty, bub?"
"No offence, pal! I'm not exacty Goliath, here, myself. I just wanted to know if ya wanted to put some money on the fight. Some little American girl smaller'n both of us is gonna fight Big Tim in the back room."
"Oh yeah? Where's she from in America?"
"Brooklyn, New York."
"Yeah? Red-haired broad? Built like a brick shithouse? Lots of tattoos?"
"That's her. You know her?"
"Everybody in New York knows her, bub."
Logan had twenty dollars left, after he paid for his beer.
He fished it out of his pocket.
"I'll put twenty on the girl. Double or nothing."
She might need a hand, and he did have twenty bucks in it, so he grabbed his beer and followed the man who'd taken his bet into the back room.
Time for another damsel in distress.
When he saw her, he felt sorry for Big Tim, whoever he was.
"Yeah, that's her. Every time I see her that mad, I think I'm in love."
The man with the limp just looked at him, slack-jawed in disbelief.
"What can I say, bub? I like my women bad. And mean. And red-haired."
"Well, she sure has all of them covered, mister."
People used nice words like feral and atavistic to describe him, and they used not-so-nice words like vicious fucking mad dog animal, but those words didn't quite cover the girl in the Army-issue men's tank top and boxer shorts with new dirt and bloodstains covering up the old.
And this little red-haired girl even shorter than him, she was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, the kind of woman whose hair was red because it was made from the hellfire in which the Devil had forged her.
She was so goddamn mad her nostrils were flaring and she was snarling, snarling like a wild beast. She hopped from foot to foot, slamming one fist into the other, cursing and muttering to herself. Almost gibbering, like somebody who had gotten used to being alone and talking to themselves because there was nobody else to talk to. A terrible grin that could make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and turn your blood to ice cubes split her face in half, big red lips, red as the rope of long red hair that swung down almost past her ass. Her green eyes were going yellow with rage and he could see all the muscles in her strong, stocky, compact body tensing and twisting and roiling underneath her skin.
And when you looked in those green eyes gone all sick and yellowy, there was nobody fucking home.
Big Tim didn't have a chance.
The poor bastard was still staring at all the tits and ass on display in that undershirt and shorts when the girl came roaring out of her corner and the first shot from her tattooed arm exploded into his solar plexus with such force that Big Jim's chest seemed to cave in around her hand.
For a minute, Logan thought she'd put her hard little hand right through the big bastard's body.
The girl may not have ripped his guts out, but she wiped the floor with him. The spectators had to stnd back so they wouldn't get drops of Big Jim's blood all over them. She hit him hard and she hit him fast and she hit him again, and again, and again, relentlessly.
Big Jim only got a few hits in before he was kissing the floorboards.
They were hard hits, too, from a big man's big fists that he was throwing in sudden fear and panic that something so much smaller than him could inflict such a powerful hurting on him.
The kid shrugged them off like a fly buzzing around her head.
She had a hard time turning it off, too; you could tell she was disappointed the poor bastard went down so fast.
He was smart enough to curl up in a little ball and start to cry like a little girl, and put his arms over his head and beg her to please quit hitting him.
That stopped the kid cold, and although she cursed him in language that would make a sailor blush, she walked away from him.
She looked at Logan, quizzically at first, but then she grinned at him in an unsettling way, and raised her glass to him.
After the fight she let her hair down and put on a pair of dirty Levis over her boxers and put her boots on and sat at the bar, doing shots of Yukon Jack and spitting blood onto the floor in her equally dirty undershirt.
Her eyes darted around the room, wild and feral under that long red hair, looking for somebody to move on her so she could kill them, stick her fist through their body and tear out their spines.
She wasn't happy with wiping the floor with big Jim, this girl wanted to fucking kill somebody.
She pounded on the table with a tattooed fist and yelled for the owner.
"C'mon, ya cocksucker, ya better pay me or I'll fuck this place up, good!" she snarled in a gravelly and menacing Brooklyn accent, hoarse from disuse.
She left in a hurry and Wolverine followed her out in time to see a black '63 Wildcat tearing out of the lot, kicking up gravel and dirt in a cloud.
She was the Harlequin. A mask operating out of New York City who did the real dirty work, and when she was out of costume, whooped it up like your typical Brooklyn Irish thug.
Nobody would know to look at her, but she was the mad genius type. Her father was the Joker, she was the Bat's ward and she worked for Dr. Manhattan in Washington, and none of them could do anything to rein her in.
He'd seen her last in a bar upstate, and the beer he'd bought her was interrupted by four men trying to rob the joint and kill any witnesses.
A plan that didn't go too well for the robbers.
You see, Logan was the best at what he did, but what he didn't wasn't very nice.
Then again, what the Harlequin had done wasn't too polite, either.
Big Tim was lucky he didn't hit the Harlequin in any way that really made her mad.
But Harlequin was a New York City girl, what was she doing in a half-assed bare knuckle prize fight in a dive in BC?
And the last time he saw her, she was a little crazy and a little drunk, and she did what she had to do when some shitheel put a gun in her face, but she sure as hell wasn't most of the way towards savagery or insanity, or both.
Something had happened to her.
Something real bad.
Logan watched the car drive off, and lit up one of the five cigars he had left.
The little man with the limp came out and gave him two hundred and fifty dollars.
"What's this for, bub?"
"You won it, bettin' on that hellcat. Hell, I ain't never even heard of anything like that."
"Yeah, me neither. And I've seen some shit. How's that guy in there?"
"Doctor's with him. Tim'll be alright. Shit, I ain't worried about Tim. Must be something wrong with that girl."
"I know her. We, ah, we work in the same business."
"Well, you better go after her, mister. Somebody gotta help that poor girl."
"Does she really look like she needs help to, you, bub?"
"Yeah. The kinda help you get in the nuthouse."
In the nuthouse. Like her father.
"Can't have that. I'll have to try and reason with her."
Wolverine started tracking her, sniffing for her scent in the air and crouching down to look at her tire tracks.
Harlequin was crazy before whatever happened to drive her right to the edge, and she was in the mood to dismember first and ask questions later, but there wasn't anything she could really do to him, and goddamn, she still smelled good.
Real good.
Like a red-headed angel from Hell.
Another damsel-in-distress, here we go again.
***
He tracked her all night before he found where she was camped.
She was nowhere in sight, but her car was there, and she had a box of supplies up in a tree and drying clothes hanging on a branch.
Her scent was everywhere, all over everything, almost like she'd been spreading it around, purposefully to keep the other animals away.
There was a fire pit in which the ashes were still warm, and underneath them were layers upon layers of cold ashes. A regulation mess kit was still sitting on a stump, neatly packed away.
The kid had been camped here for awhile, and the way she had her meagre gear lying around, she wasn't far.
She also hadn't been in anything close to a rational state the night before, and he didn't know in what stage of berserk the morning would find her, so Logan figured he'd better approach gently and keep talking and hope she remembered who the fuck he was.
Not that she could really do him any permanent damage, but, to date he'd never had his spleen torn out by a woman, and he didn't want today to be the first time.
He put both of his hands where she could see them, and sat very slowly down on the tree stump.
"Harlequin? It's Wolverine. You remember me, don'tcha? I'm not gonna hurt you, alright? I saw ya fight last night and I been walkin' since then, trayin' to find you. I'm kinda in a jam, myself. I'm on my own out here, and all I got is the clothes on my back and the boots on my feet. If you could let me have somethin' ta eat and maybe sleep here awahile, I'd be much obliged. It's a long walk back to New York."
Her red head popped up out of the bushes, and she had a slightly more rational look in her eyes.
"You crazy, Logan? I may be nuts, but I ain't got fuckin' amnesia. Why wouldn't I know youse?"
"Hey, I saw you in the bar last night. You didn't seem like you knew anything, anymore."
"Yeah. I been in a real bad way. I don't have much, in the way of food, or dough, but I got more than you have. I was kinda just dozin' off in the grass back here after I took a bath. Coudja throw me those clothes hangin' on the branch?"
She came out dressed, and she had a dazed look on her face, like she wasn't sure what the fuck was going on, but she looked glad to see a familiar face.
"I thought that was you in that shithole last night. I mean, who the fuck else looks like you, Logan? I was gonna ask ya if youse wanted to have a drink with me, but you looked like you were in a real shitty mood."
"Bein' on foot, sleepin' rough and eatin' when you can will do that to you, kid."
"Well, I don't have much. But I was about to have peanut-butter and jelly, a smoke, and a beer for breakfast. I'll go raid the supply box."
Logan was hungry, he hadn't eaten anything the day before, and before he knew it he'd eaten a whole loaf of bread and a whole jar of jelly and a whole jar of peanut butter, not to mention drinking three beers.
"Shit, I hope you got more food."
"Well, I got two hundred, altogether, with the money I made last night. I can get gas and food."
"I'll throw in with you, Liv. I made two-fifty bettin' my last twenty on you. It beats walkin', and I know this country a lot better than you do."
"I guess you do. When does it get to be winter?"
"Winter? Here? Sooner than you think. The end of September. Which doesn't give you a whole lot more time to fuck around pretending to be a mountain man. I used to be a mountain man right around here, and your survival training you got from the Bat got you this far, but you're a New York City girl. It sure as hell won't get you through the winter. You got six weeks, kid, and then you're gonna die out here."
"I never thought of that. I'd have to find shelter pretty quick when winter came. And I can't say my survival training extends to building a cabin in wintertime."
"Mine does. And hunting, and fishing and all the rest of it. Yours should. You seem pretty strong, I think you could take it. If you really want to be Liv Napier of the Great White North, fine. We'll stay. I got all the time in the world. It's kind of like throwing Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch. But the Bat would never forgive me if he thought I let you alone out here. You remember Bruce, don't you? And what about the Doc, in Washington? And his old lady, she's your buddy, right? I'll bet there's a lot of people in the States tearin' their hair out, wondering just where the fuck you got to."
"I hadn't thought of that. But I ain't been thinkin', lately. Not rationally, anyway."
"It'd be a hell of a lot easier just to put our money together and go back to New York. I don't know about you, but I've gotten kinda attached to cold beer, a warm bed, TV, and the A & P."
"Sounds pretty good. Jesus, I haven't seen a fuckin' bed since I don't know when! I'm like Davy fuckin' Crockett, out heah. And you gotta point, Logan. Jesus, I gotta get back to Toronto, find that cocksucker who burned me for three grand. And I gotta go home. I got work to do at the lab, I got a class to teach in September. An' Bruce says he's gonna apprentice me to another mask, and I think he means Eddie. What the fuck have I been thinkin'? This shell shock shit, it's fuckin' with my mind. That and drinkin'. And not drinkin'. And bein' alone. Jesus, I'm so fuckin' glad to see youse! I'm sorry I sound nuts, but, yunno I haven't said more than ten words to anybody for, I don't even know how long its been? That shrink was right. I'm losin' my marbles. And to think I went on this trip for my mental health."
Liv chuckled and took another sip of her beer.
Logan frowned.
So that was it. The poor kid was fucked up in the head, and she came North to clear her mind, with some loser asshole who took advantage of her, and left her flat in the middle of an unfamiliar country, with any luck to die like a dog on the side of the road.
"You'll be alright, kid. Especially after you kill that cocksucker. Hell, I'll help ya. It beats walkin' back to New York. And I been shell-shocked so many goddamn times, the way they've fucked with my head? Just don't let 'em give ya any drugs. Trust me, there's more to that shit than they tellya."
"I guess you get this flashback shit all the time."
"Almost every day, Liv. You just gotta live with it. If you can get through it, it passes. You just can't let it get to you. Everything does. So, you got a game plan, here?"
"Kind of. I was gonna break camp today, and see if I could make it to Alberta before I had to stop again, but I've been thinking, if you could make two hundred-fifty on twenty, and I'm sittin' on two C-notes, if you bet the farm on me, double or nothing, plus what I get when I win, we could get enough bread together to get going. You know, so we can eat and drink and live like people. Go to campsites. Buy a tent and some fuckin' sleeping bags. Eat at diners. Get a case of beer. Maybe even get a room, someplace, once in awhile. Normal shit. And I can get out of the fight business, before I lose my mind."
"I thought you were in the fighting business, Liv." Logan chuckled.
The way she laid it out, it sounded like a pretty good ride back to the States.
"I am. But to knock these chumps around the way I do three nights a week, without getting my ass handed to me, I hadda get a little extra edge on. When I look at these big dumb bastards, I think about every big dumb bastard who ever tried to push me around. Yunno how that is. And I think of Slim, in Toronto, who took me for two grand and then some, and left me flat in Whitehorse about five weeks ago. But that's not quite enough, yunno. So I got an extra edge, going. I ain't been laid in five weeks. Five fuckin' weeks! And I haven't been jackin' off, either. Man, I'm telling ya, Logan, if I don't get to pop my cork, soon, I am gonna fuckin' kill somebody."
That last little piece of information tripping blithely off the lips of this little red-headed well-stacked maniac caused Wolverine to swallow a mouthful of smoke and begin choking.
"You okay, man?"
"You don't beat around the bush, do you, kid?"
Liv laughed.
The family resemblance was somewhat disquieting.
"Well I sure as hell hope you do, cos lemme tellya, it's burning. I'm sendin' out fucking smoke signals ovah heah. I gotta keep it together until tonight, after the fight, and then…"
She laughed again.
"Well you know what they say, darlin'. Ass, grass, or gas, nobody rides for free. And I'm flat broke and I don't smoke weed. And you sure smell good to me." Logan said.
The Harlequin gave him the old once-over, looking him up and down like he was a car she was planning on buying.
"You wanna kick the fuckin' tires?" he asked.
"I was just wonderin' how much horsepower the engine's got."
"Just as much as you got in the Wildcat."
"Yeah, but I worked on that engine, myself. You smell pretty goddamn good yourself. Just like a man."
Kid fairly snarled it at him, she was running hotter than hell.
Asking for it? She's begging for it. You know what you gotta do, cowboy.
Think with the big head, Logan. She's gotta save it for the fight.
"Kid, you're workin' on this one. You keep this shit up, and the only thing you're gonna be fightin' is the urge to scream my name."
At that point, the Harlequin levelled the absolutely most devastating look of heavy molten naked lust at Logan that he had ever seen on a woman's face.
If he had been a cartoon character, smoke would have come out of his ears. It was fire down below and without him willing it he could feel his claws singing out of his hands.
Detroit had built that Buick Wildcat to do two things. Take a beating and go like hell. And God, or more likely, the Devil himself, had built the wildcat in front of him to do two things.
Kill and fuck.
He was glad he was wanted on the latter and not the former.
You just hit the jackpot, bub. You are lookin' at the li'le red-headed devil who can make you forget all about Jean for a good, long time.
"Woops! Sorry about the claws, kid. Sometimes they gotta mind of their own."
People either looked at the claws with fear, or they pretended they weren't there, but Liv seemed oddly fascinated.
"Holy shit, is that how they work? They come outa there? No, don't put em back, yet. Lemme see. Can I see?"
"You've seen my claws, before."
"Yeah, but I never gotta chance to really look at 'em. I'll be careful."
"Alright."
Liv reached over, and ran her hand up and down the smooth sides of one of Logan's claws.
He didn't know what to think.
"I'll betcha you killed more fuckers than cancer with these things, huh, Logan. And they come out of here…like this. That makes sense. Jesus, they sure are beautiful, though! Lemme see the other hand. That's amazing! They're perfectly symmetrical. Just like fingers. Of course they are. Everything in nature, even the stars, have a certain symmetry. Jesus, it must be some kinda thrill, being at the vanguard of evolution. What a piece of work is man. The paragon of animals."
Logan had plenty of scientists look at him like he was a specimen, and plenty of women look at him like he was a prize bull, but he never had a woman scientist look at him as if his mutation was something that was symmetrical or beautiful, that reminded her of the stars and Shakespeare.
He'd never thought of himself that way, as being at the vanguard of evolution, a man at the advent of a Brave New World.
"Sorry. I didn't mean to stare. It's just, as a scientist, I'm in constant awe of the universe, and the, well, yunno, the simple miracles of evolution." Liv said, as Logan retracted his claws.
"So I'm a simple miracle of evolution, huh? I don't think I was born with these, though, kid."
"Sure you were. I got a degree in this shit, I know what I'm talkin' about. Actually, you are a very complex miracle of evolution. You see, for some reason, I think it's because if the rapid advances in human technology that have made our environment a lot fuckin' scarier and more dangerous, human have to evolve to be able to withstand the environment we've created. And here you are. Now take cats. They're predatory mammals, too, and humans, we're the killer ape, or that's how the latest theory goes. Now, you see, cats, they have retractable claws. But a human hand isn't like a cat's hand. I mean, here, lemme see your hand."
Logan thought that the kid was pulling his leg, but she wasn't; he could see dust blowing off the wheels in that big jumped-up brain of hers as it whirred back to life.
And besides, what she was saying made sense in a way he never thought of before.
He held out his hand, and she took it.
"Jesus, you got big hands! But you'd have to, wouldn't you? Anyway, see, now if you look at your palm, and you think of a cat's paw pads, it's kind of the same. The same sort of principle. But cats, they walk on all their limbs, and humans, we don't walk on our hands, we use them for just about everything, so dewclaws wouldn't work. You couldn't put them in the palms, and our fingers are too long and we use them too much. And if our fingernails were claws, that wouldn't work too well, either. You still wouldn't be able to use your hand and then the claw wouldn't retract. But right here, between our fingers, these three, not the ones on the end... See, right here, between your fingers? This bit right here, it's not doing anything. It's not like the webbing on a duck's foot, it's just this connective tissue. A good place for something like a dewclaw. This is where the room for improvement is. But for dewclaws to work on a human, they'd have to be long. Longer than your fingers, so that you could still use your hands, and your finger while you were using your claws, and so the goddamn claws wouldn't cut your fingers off. That's' why they come out of here, and here, and here, and that's' why they stick out so far. Now a guy in a lab, especially in a military lab, he'd never think of that. He's put the claws in your fingertips, or he'd make them too short, he'd fuck it up. You follow?"
What the kid was saying made sense, now that he thought about it. Perfect sense, And if there was one thing he knew about the military it was that FUBAR was standard operating procedure, especially military intelligence.
They wouldn't be able to think up something like his claws in a million years.
"Yeah. Keep talkin'."
"The army would never hire an evolutionary biologist to do research, and if they implanted them, there would have to be some mechanism. And some way to activate it. Machines don't work on their own. People have to operate machines. You're not a switchblade, are you? There's no button you push or switch you flick. There would have to be one for each claw. Where the fuck would that go on your hand? Or your arm? That's not how it works. When a cat wants his claws to come out, out they come. So do yours. And, furthermore, there's no machine or bar or housing implanted under the skin for the claws to go in and out of. You'd be able to see it and feel it, but I can't. Your hand feels just like a normal human hand. Except right here. Where your veins are, right between them, mind you, so that they don't get sliced, I can feel what seems to be three more bones. They can't do surgery like that. They would have sliced your veins all to pieces and had the claws ripping them open every time they came out. And finally two more things tell me that you were born with those claws. They come out when you want them to, but just now, when I got you turned on, they just slipped out. Like when you pet a cat and he purrs and he stretches and all his dewclaws flex and retract. Simple?"
That big brain, it was firing on all cylinders, now.
"The claws even explain your other mutations. Even your physical characteristics. The healing ability, you got that so that every time the claws came out you wouldn't bleed to death. Now, since nature selected you to have a long life, it had to make you pretty fucking weatherproof. It made you low to the ground, and square, and stocky and gave you a lot of mass, so that your legs and your arms wouldn't wear out over the years, so that you'd have a low center of gravity, more stability, all your body organs in a comeback space under dense muscles like rocks. And since you're so solid, and you have a lot of mass without being stretched out over a lot of space, it makes regeneration easier. Makes you more efficient. You can take in less food and use more energy. Don't you see, Logan? You're perfect for what it was you evolved to be. The universe knows what the fuck's it's doing. It took billions of years for you to evolve to an absolute degree of perfection to be this brand new kind of human being. No lab could have done that. There's bone under the metal, just like in the rest of your body. You see, you're a prototype. A prototype for a human that's smarter, and stronger and has natural defences. A human being who's ready for the piece of shit world that we've created for ourselves. It even explains why you're so goddamn horny. You gotta go out there and make a whole lotta little Logans for Mom Nature, so that the mutation can continue. And the thing about mutations, the successful ones, they become the norm. That's how evolution works. In as little as a thousand years, which is like a blink in terms of geological time and the evolutionary process, there'll be people just like you all over the world. And, unless some predator evolves that can wipe you out, you might not have worn out by then. If an ordinary human in pretty good shape can make it to a hundred or a hundred and ten, there's no reason why somebody like you wouldn't make it to a thousand. Jesus, that's amazing I wish I could get there with you. Then again, if my space-time research goes the way I want it to, I can be."
Logan looked at Liv like he'd never seen her before.
The kid was incandescently fucking brilliant.
No wonder she was so unstable.
He thought about everything that she said, and it all made sense.
"Liv, do you know what you just did? You just figured me out. You looked at the way the claws came out of my hands, and at my wrist and my fuckin' arm, and you told me where I came from, where I am, how I got here from there, and where I'm going. In less than ten minutes. Jesus!"
"I'm a scientist. A physicist and a biologist, to be exact. That's what I do. I look at the way things work, and then I apply what I know to what I see, and I make deductions about why things work that way based on the other things that I already know about. It's simple. I woulda thought you had figured that out a long time ago." Liv said.
"I probably did. But they wiped my memory so many times, I'm lucky I remember where my dick is."
"I don't think you can wipe somebody's memory. Science doesn't know shit about the human brain, at this point. I'll bet it's all in there, somewhere. Just nobody can figure out how to make it all come out."
"I never thought of it that way, Liv. You do have some kinda fuckin' brain."
"Well, so do you, I hear. But, sometimes, it's better just to be a simple animal. Give the big brain a rest."
"Yeah, especially tonight. Look, we gotta get our heads outa the clouds, here. You gotta make us a shitload of money, tonight, or we're fucked. After that, we can play chess and read Shakespeare, and talk about the theory of relativity while we re-enact Walden. Tonight, though, you gotta hand somebody his ass. But they're gonna be waiting for you in the next town. Are you sure you can beat this guy? Because I used to do some work for this logging camp about fifty miles north, and in two weeks, I could make us enough money that with the four-fifty we've got, we'd do alright."
"Why should you bust your ass when I can make us all the dough in one night? I don't care if he's Paul Bunyan, I'll rip his fuckin' arms off and stuff 'em up his ass! Not just anybody can kick my ass. I learned how to do what I do from Batman and the Joker, and I lived in East New York for years. Somebody like you could kick my ass, but I'd still give ya a run for your money. That's about it. This two-bit, low-rent, in-bred redneck motherfucker is mine, whoever the fuck he is." Liv said, confidently.
Logan realised that shouldn't have gotten him hard, again, but, his father always used to say, like goes with like, and that SOB Old Black Tom was one to know.
Wolverine didn't say anything, but he could scarcely believe it.
The motherfucker was seven feet tall, he had to be seven feet tall, he was goddamn Paul Bunyan.
He thought about the money he bet on Liv. Four hundred and fifty dollars. Everything that both of them had. If she won, they stood to walk out of the place with about two grand.
If she lost, there was logging, or they could just do it the easy way. He could let the claws out and get their four hundred and fifty back, on the grounds that it wasn't even close to a fair fight.
What a piece of work am I, the paragon of animals.
That was when Logan stopped thinking about the money, and started thinking more about what this big motherfucker was going to do to Liv. Sure, he was only about an inch taller than her and he could hold his own, alright, but he was a man, and a mutant, a well-honed killing machine as crafted by nature.
Liv, she was as mean as a goddamn, well, a goddamn little wolverine who came home to a burrow full of snake piss, but there was only so much she could do, right?
He figured, fuck the money, if I have to get in the ring and get her out of here, alive, I'll do it. She's a good kid, a smart kid, and when she looks at me she doesn't see a runt and a freak, she sees a higher form of human being. The goddamn world probably needs a brain likes hers to figure shit out so that people can live long enough for me to die of old age.
The big SOB stripped down to his shorts.
He looked real cocky, the motherfucker, and the big bastard had muscles on his muscles.
Logan was about done, he was getting ready to jack the bartender up against the wall, get their money, grab the kid and get the fuck out, but then, he heard it the way everybody in the bar heard it.
The first time the sound got all the men in the back room's attention, the second time it made all the tough loggers and truckers and rednecks go quiet as church mice.
It was a funny sort of sound, something somewhere between a snarl and a scream and a noise like some big predator would make, a wildcat, or a wolf.
Hhhnnnnnngarrrrrggh! Hnnnnnngaaarghhhhhh!Logan realised that was Liv, out there, getting herself ready for the fight.
He changed his tune.
"Hey, bub! Yeah, you in the dirty shorts, Mr. Universe! If you know what's good for you, you'd better get the fuck outa here." He suggested.
"Fuck you, shorty! You're a little runt, and so is that crazy little Mick girlfriend of yours. After I get done wiping the floor with her, I'll start on you. Then maybe I'll show her what a real man is good for and you can watch me."
Normally, a man making threats of that kind to Logan about a woman he was with would cause that unfortunate man to get to see what his guts looked like as they came shooting out of his belly until he died, but Wolverine only smiled and lifted his glass.
Let the kid take his ass down a peg or two.
"It's your funeral, Paul Bunyan. Hey kid, Mr. Big Man is gonna beat me up and give it to you whether you like it or not. C'mon in, an' show him just what you got to give him, whether he likes it, or not."
Logan said this, knowing that not even a year ago, Liv had foiled an attempt on her virtue by a serial rapist and sex murderer by physically annihilating him with her bare hands.
His cause of death, however, was discovered at the autopsy when the coroner discovered the guy's cock and his balls rammed down his throat.
He'd choked to death on them.
Liv let out one more scream of inarticulate fury before she burst into the room in her military issue OD underwear, roaring and snarling and gnashing her teeth. The kid was really on a roll, flexing her arms and roaring and hopping around like an angry gorilla. She was having a hell of a good time, letting that inner Joker come bursting out of the deck to roll around on the grass and raise some Hell.
Logan had to admit, sometimes it just felt goddamn good to be the beast.
"Rip his fuckin' arms off and stuff 'em up his ass!" he yelled in encouragement.
She tore into Paul Bunyan like she was a wolf and he was a deer. It took her all of three or four minutes to bring him to the canvas, and she was showing no signs of stopping.
Made the beating she'd given Big Tim look like a kiss from mother.
"Help me! Get her off me!" Paul Bunyan screamed.
"Gee, I don't know, bub. I really didn't like all that shit about you beating me up and fucking the kid whether she liked it or not. I think she should just kill you."
"I didn't mean it! Lady, I'm sorry! I'm sorry! You win! Just quit hittin' me! She won't quit hittin' me! Help me, buddy, please!"
Logan puffed on his cigar, thoughtfully.
"Say uncle."
"What? Fuck no! I never said "Uncle" in my life!"
"I hope it was a good one. Because it's not gonna end well."
"Okay! Uncle! Uncle UNCLE!" Paul Bunyan screamed.
Liv quit hitting him.
"Uncle?" she asked.
"UNCLE! UNCLE! UNCLE!"
"Pussy. Big fuckin' pussy." Liv sneered.
She jumped up on top of Paul Bunyan, she actually stood on him, and roared in triumph, beating her chest and ripping her tank top in two like King Kong.
That left her naked except for the boxers and her tattoos, but almost everybody in the place were too scared to look at her tits.
Not Logan.
He was fucking well looking.
Then she got down, and walked towards the bar.
Logan took off his undershirt and gave it to her.
"Hurry up and put this on, darlin', or I'm gonna hafta kill every man in this place?"
"Huh? Oh, right. Thanks, Logan."
After that performance, you would think that the owner would want to pay her and get her the fuck out of his place, but he gave them trouble.
"Bub, are you out of your fuckin' mind? Where the fuck are you from? Don't you know that around these parts, there's only one penalty for welching on a bet, and it ain't thirty days in the hole. You wanna kill him, kiddo? You did the work."
"No, no, I don't want any trouble. Let's just go out to the car."
Logan couldn't believe it.
She was going out to the car.
"We're not done yet." He told the bartender and followed her.
She got in the car, and he got in with her
"Are you out of your fuckin' mind? What about our money?"
"Relax, man. I'm gonna go get our fuckin' money. But I don't like that prick who's in charge, or his place. He tried to throw in a ringer when he set me up to fight some asshole, and they don't want to pay us and anybody else who bet on me what they owe us. We're superheroes, man. We gotta teach people like that a lesson about what's right and wrong. Time for us do our jobs. Reach back behind your seat and pass me that old-fashioned instrument for enforcing justice on shitheels."
The kid had a goddamn Tommy Gun.
"Putcher safety belt on and hold onto your ass. We're gonna make this an open-air joint."
"I like the way you think, Liv."
"Thanks."
She backed up a little, blew the horn a few times to let them know she was coming, and drove the Wildcat through the wall and into the bar.
Then she jumped out, with the chopper at the ready.
"Alright, ya motherfuckers! Drop your cocks and grab your socks, it's party-time! Hahahahahahahaha! A-ahahahahahahahahaha!"
Everybody hit the dirt, and laughing like Charlie Manson at the St. Valentine's Day massacre, Liv ventilated the bar.
When she was sure she had made her point she walked over to the bar, climbed up on the stool and hauled the terrified owner and bartender over the bar.
Logan rolled down his window.
"Bet you wished you just gave us the money and let us go quietly, huh, bub?" he asked.
Liv grabbed the bartender by his neck and his nuts, held him over hear head and shook him a little, then slammed him to the ground.
She put her foot on his neck.
"Okay, who bet on me to win?"
Quite a few guys, some of them from the previous night came out from under some tables.
"Thanks for your support, fellas. Okay, shitheel. Time for you to get your ass up, and pay these nice men. Then you can pay me, and my friend. If you don't, I'm gonna ask everybody to leave, real nice and I'm gonna shoot this dump up until the walls cave in. And, as for you, shitheel, hey, Logan, come on out and show this motherfucker what you're going to do to him if he continues to act like a cunt."
Wolverine got out of the car and unsheathed his claws.
Snikt!
"I don't think he's acting, darlin'." Logan observed.
"I thought that was him." One of the guys said.
"Yeah, me too." Said another.
"Makes sense he'd be travelling with a chick like that." Said a third.
Logan crouched down beside the bar owner, and held his claws against the man's neck.
"Well?"
"Okay! Okay! I'll pay everybody! Everybody!"
Even the guys who lost started to cheer.
***
Liv stopped at the next bar they passed and came out with a case of Guinness and a gallon of Yukon Jack. As they were doing 80 down the windy backroads and Liv puffed on a filterless Lucky while slugging down Yukon Jack like it was Coca-Cola, Logan remembered that this kid was one hundred per-cent mortal, and realised that she was crazy, one-hundred percent batshit fucking nuts.
He smiled at her.
Definitely his kind of girl.
"How about that shit, huh? Was that some kind of shit, or what?" Liv enthused.
"How much did we make?"
"Fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred bucks! We got almost two thousand fucking dollars! I thought maybe we'd make another five hundred, holy fucking shit! Shit I'm gonna buy some grass! I haven't smoked grass since 1968, but fuck it. I'm on vacation. I'm gonna buy me some grass and smoke it and I'm gonna get drunk and high off my ass and stay that way for a week. We're got it made in the fuckin' shade, my man! Everything's groovy. Gimme another beer, I ain't half as drunk as I wanna be. It's smooth sailing from here on out. You and me we're gonna have ourselves a real good time. People are gonna fuckin' remember the shit we are gonna do between here and New York State."
Logan cracked himself another beer.
She was still crazy, crazy as Eddie was.
Good old Eddie.
He and Eddie had served together in Europe and then in the Pacific under Steve Rogers. If there was anybody you wanted to have driving a tank on a suicide mission where death was certain, it was Eddie Blake.
He'd drive you right the hell out of it, laughing, over the bones of the surprised enemy.
The thing about Eddie was, it wasn't that bullets didn't affect him because he had special powers like the men served with did, bullets didn't affect him because it really fucking pissed him off when somebody fired them into his thick hide.
And Eddie, he was still fucking nuts, and still going strong.
Right now he was over in 'Nam with the Doc, killing everything that walked, crawled, or flew in the name of the good old US of A.
His men loved him.
He kept them alive and made the enemy extremely dead.
Still a helluva soldier, too, as Logan knew firsthand from doing a 14 month tour with his old friend that had ended only recently.
Just in time for him to meet Yukon Mel Reinhardt.
But, things could be worse.
He could be Eddie, with Napalm as his apprentice.
Thinking about it made him laugh.
"What's so funny?"
"Nothin'. I like your plan. It beats walking." He replied.
They drove for about an hour, and then, on a lonely stretch of road heavily wooded on both sides, Liv found a trail big enough for the Wildcat to navigate and slowly made her way through the brush to a clearing not unlike the one she had been camped in before.
She killed the headlights, and there they were, alone in the dark, with nothing but the moon to see them.
Liv turned on that look again, the one she'd given him earlier that day, and sealed it with a smile that was completely unlike the one she gave a man when she was about to hand him his ass.
He had known, since they met, that someday, he was going to get that smile.
Logan knew what he was about to do, and he felt bad about it, but what was he supposed to do.
He was just a man, wasn't he?
"Get in the back." She said.
Wolverine smiled back at her, or rather, he leered.
"I don't know about that, darlin'. If you're as hot as I think you are, I hope you got a sleeping bag, because it's gonna be hell on your yellow leather upholstery. Sometimes the claws just come out."
"You must be hell on sheets." Liv quipped.
"Oh, I'm hell on just about anything." Logan snarled.
He was just this side of deranged, he could taste how good she smelled and he felt horny as a junkyard dog during a full moon.
They got out of the car in a hurry.
She didn't have a sleeping bag, but she had a blanket that she spread on the ground, and she dropped her clothes off like they never belonged on her body to begin with.
It was a beautiful summer night.
The kind that poets write about.
The grass was green, the trees were green, the moon was full. And even though the Harlequin looked good in a bra and shorts with two guns in holsters in the bra and a chopper in her hands, she looked even better naked in the moonlight.
She looked up at the moon, and laughed, and howled at it, and Logan got the idea that she always howled at the full moon. She kept laughing and she laid down on the blanket and all her red hair fell over her and the blanket and some trailed behind her onto the grass.
She sat up on her elbows and moved her hair around, hauled up her knees and set them wide apart.
Her green eyes looked yellow and feral again, but violence was the furthest thing from her mind.
Logan couldn't help it, he felt the claws singing out of his hands and raked them across the ground, willing them to retract before he put his arms around the most brutal and violent avenger to come out of New York City since the Comedian's debut in 1938.
Funny how she didn't seem too deadly to him, just then.
Not the way she giggled and sighed and had her hard little hands all over him.
"Big for a short guy, ain't you? That's good. Real good. What a piece of work you are. The paragon of animals." She sighed, absently, laughing a little
She was crazy and drunk and naked and she already had one leg around him. Crazy and naked and horny and drunk and as bad and mean and no good a woman as there ever was; she was the kind of girl that a man usually wouldn't kiss on her dirty little mouth, but Logan kissed her just the same, falling into her hair that was all around them.
Kiss her all over until I get the taste of her in my mouth as heavy as her scent in the air.
He found out she tasted as good as she smelled, like a fine wine, and he felt drunk.
And that was fine.