Disclaimer: Mine, Maximum Ride is not. Want legal ramifications, I do not. Purposely channeling Yoda, I am...simply because I'm so tired of giving these disclaimers. Gahhh. :P
Still giving infinite thanks and hugs, hugs, hugs to flYegurl, Alactricity, WinterSky101, pandorad24, soccerislife14, AmyQueen95, Shar're from Abydos, BeTrueToThyself, and Locked in a Stony Tower for reviewing and making my day that much better. Reviews are the only thanks a fanfic writer has for posting and each comment means a lot to me. :) Okay, I'll stop gushing now.
Warning(s): we're dealing with some touchy material due to a certain psychotic scientist...Stark, that is...and his rather blatant disregard for human life and religion. Expect twisted-ness. Also, we're going in for an entirely Fang-POV with a small bit from Stark at the end. Sorry, no Iggy this chapter. I simply ran out of space to put his bit in (the entire escape scene got away from me and took over), but don't worry, we'll be back to normal next chapter.
On that note...enjoy.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Escape from the Snake's Den
The problem with breaking into a high-security building full of mutated children was, predictably, the people who worked there didn't want anyone to find their dirty, illegal secrets. It therefore took Nudge a good five minutes to get through the security panels warding the door that would let their group inside.
"Finally," she breathed, when at last the door's metal bolts rolled back. "I was starting to think we'd never get in."
Fang pushed the door open and strode through into a long white hall of fluorescent lights and polished tile. Memories slammed into him from all sides, horrific, fragmented images of unspeakable experiments and syringes, blinding light and drying blood. He shook them away without another thought and balled his hands into fists. He had a job to do.
Not a single Eraser was in sight. Weird, he thought, but who was he to complain?
"Do we have a plan?" Nudge asked. She stared down the hallway with wide-open eyes, her skinny arms cocked at a ready angle in case she had to throw a punch.
"Find the bombs," Fang replied curtly. "Shut them down and get the kids out."
"But, Fang," Angel broke in, "how are we going to do that? The whitecoats took all the helicopters with them."
Fang hesitated. "We'll deal with that when we get to it. For now, let's just try to find the explosives."
At that moment, a blaring alarm rang through the hallway, nearly deafening the children's keen ears.
"What's that?" Nudge asked shrilly.
"The security alarm," Fang said. "They know we're here."
"Already?"
In answer to Nudge's question, two Erasers sprinted around the corner, guns in their muscled hands. The three children threw themselves out of the way as one of the wolf-mutants fired.
"Fang, Nudge!" Angel shouted. She'd opened a door and was waving frantically at the descending staircase behind it. "This way!"
Both mutants bolted for the stairs. Fang slammed the door shut behind them, jerking back as a bullet dented the protective metal.
"Down," he ordered the two girls. They turned and scurried down the stairs with him on their heels. The stairs spiraled downwards, with a door marking the exit to every floor. Before they had gone down one level, the two Erasers clattered into the staircase after them.
"Move!" Fang shouted. Nudge reached the next door first and pushed it open with all her weight, spilling into another winding hallway. Fang followed Angel through and didn't even bother with closing the door behind him; there was no lock on this one, so shutting it would only be a waste of time.
"Quick, try another door!" Nudge shouted. The screeching alarm had been joined with the sounds of pounding Eraser feet and hoarse shouting.
Angel reached for the nearest door and flew through. Fang closed the door behind him as quietly as he could, not wanting to draw attention. He knew that the Erasers chasing them must have arrived at their level already, but there was so much noise he didn't hear the stairway door slam shut.
"Oh my gosh."
Nudge's horrified whisper had Fang wheeling on his heel, his fists raised. What he saw made them fall back down to his sides.
There was no point in preparing to fight the occupants of the room, even if he had wanted to fight them in the first place. Mutated children in cages weren't on his list of enemies.
Nudge dropped to her knees by a cramped cage. Inside, lifting his head to see what the racket was about, a small red-headed boy who couldn't have been older than Angel lay curled on his side. Aside from the scaly tail that must have been as long as Fang was tall, the way his left eye socket was empty and his right eye bulged grotesquely, almost falling out of its swollen socket, the boy seemed otherwise unharmed and healthy. He blinked at them with interest.
Angel lifted herself on her tip-toes to look across the other cages crammed into the medium-sized room. Only a couple, pitiful moans rose up from the mutilated children that resided within. Fang was grateful; he didn't think he would have been able to bear being surrounded by ragged screams. Not again. He'd had more than enough of that before Jeb saved them.
Outside, the alarm still blared violently. The heavy tread of an Eraser hurried past, and Fang thought he heard one of them order the others to check the rooms.
"We should hide," he said.
Angel remained standing as she was, her blue eyes filled with glistening tears. When she spoke, though, her voice was calm and level. "Fang, we need to help these kids."
"Not now, Angel, the Erasers are coming." Fang winced at the incredulous look Nudge gave him and said, "Look, I know you want to help them—I do too. But we have to take care of ourselves first."
"You can't," mumbled a young voice. Fang looked down to see the red-haired boy staring at him with his remaining bloodshot eye. He almost shuddered; he hadn't looked closely enough the first time to see that the boy's pupil was bright gold and bisected by a thin line, like a lizard's.
"You can't," said the boy again. "They're gonna kill us all. I heard the whitecoats say so when they took Mia away."
"Fang," Nudge said worriedly, "I think I hear someone coming for the door."
"Get behind a cage," Fang responded immediately. He gave the one-eyed boy a regretful look and added, "Don't worry, kid. We'll get you out of here."
Nudge and Angel hurried to different sides of the room and huddled behind the largest cages they could find. Fang outstretched his wings as much as he could and flew to the very back of the room, where the cages smelled like decay and held occupants that didn't even twitch when he flew past.
Not a second after he'd curled himself into a tight ball behind a cage that stank of old, diseased blood, the door opened and let a wave of bright light into the dim containment room.
"Ugh, it stinks in here," an Eraser's deep voice growled. "Look, there's nothing here but a bunch of squeakers."
Squeaker. Fang held back a shudder at the familiar term. The Erasers called mutated children "squeakers" because of the sound they made when they were stepped on.
"Not so fast," a second Eraser said. There was the sudden, jolting sound of metal against metal as the wolf-mutant rattled an experiment's cage.
"You, lizard boy," the Eraser spat, "seen anyone come in here in the last minute or so?"
Fang's heart skipped a painful beat. The blood roared in his ears as he prepared himself to either run or stand his ground and fight for his life.
"N-no," came the boy's frightened reply. Fang blinked.
"No?" the Eraser repeated dubiously. Something whistled through the air and the one-eyed boy shrieked, dissolving into hiccupping sobs.
"Are you sure?" the Eraser asked smoothly.
"Yes," wailed the tiny boy. "I'm sure, I'm sure, don't hit me again, please! Please!"
"All right! Shut up, already!" The familiar sound of an Eraser's boot connecting with the metal cage echoed into the stale air.
The first Eraser said, "Let's get out of here. Check the other rooms for the freaks."
Over the sound of the boy's stifled hiccups, the door clicked shut. Fang immediately shot to his feet and clambered to the front of the room, where the boy huddled at the back of his cage. A thin streak of blood covered the right side of his face.
"Did they get my eye?" he whispered fearfully, lowering his hands from his cheek. Fang breathed a sigh of honest relief when he saw that the cut ended an inch below the remaining orb.
"No, you're fine," he said. The boy smiled weakly.
Angel crouched at Fang's side and set to work unlatching the cage's lock. "What's your name?" she asked curiously.
"R-Remy."
"What were you saying earlier, Remy? About the whitecoats and Mia?"
Remy swallowed so loudly that Fang heard it over the agonized groans of the other children in the room. "They took her a long time ago," he mumbled. "Early, I think. It was weird, 'cause they didn't bring any Erasers with them this time. And they said somethin' about blowing up the School."
Fang nodded grimly and reached to help the small boy out of his cage. "Can you stand?"
Remy chewed anxiously on his fingernails and nodded. Fang noticed, with a lurch of his stomach, that the boy had chewed past the nubs of his nails and reduced his fingertips to scabbed stumps.
"Fang, help us," Nudge called. He gladly obliged.
It took only a minute or so for them to unlock all of the surviving experiments' cages—most had died in their cages and had to be left behind with a small measure of pity—and by the time they'd finished, five mutants stood in front of them, listening with terrified eyes to the sounds of the frantic search being conducted outside.
Fang studied the five rescues critically. Two of them were African-American boys who, despite the similarity of the long, broad fangs that protruded over their lips like those of saber tooth tigers, didn't look like they were related. They were a little older than him, taller and meaner-looking, as well. He understood that; to survive to such an age inside the School, you sometimes had to be as ruthless as your captors.
One girl with antlers sprouting from her hairless head looked to be about his age, though there was a resigned look in her eye that told him she was a lot older, mentally. There was also one brown-haired, Nudge-aged girl, whose round face was dominated by a fungus that reminded Fang of blue cheese. She leaned against one of the saber-toothed boys, looking like she might keel over at any second.
Then there was Remy. In all, out of the fifteen cages with mutants in them, only five contained survivors.
"Can any of you fight?" Fang asked the group, trying not to think too hard about the dead bodies he would be forced to leave behind.
One of the saber-toothed boys, the one not supporting the fungus-diseased girl, stepped up. "Who are you?" he demanded. His fangs gave him a lisp, but that didn't detract from his intimidating appearance in the least. Fang leaned back despite himself.
"My name is Fang," he said clearly. "This is Nudge, and Angel. We broke in to dismantle the bombs the whitecoats set up around the School."
The saber-toothed boy eyed him suspiciously for a moment before jerking a thumb toward the surviving kids. "That's Spider," he said, gesturing to the other dark-skinned boy. He leveled Fang with a warning glare. "We're not related, but we might as well be. If you cross him, you cross me."
Fang nodded in understanding. Like him and Iggy. Well, maybe not so much after the stunt he'd pulled the day before, but he was sure he would find a way to make it up to his bro. Somehow.
"I'm Dom," the boy continued. "The girl with the antlers is Greta, and the sick girl is Livy. You know Remy already."
Nudge turned to the second saber-toothed boy expectantly. "Why do they call you Spider?"
Spider smirked and moved closer to the light filtering under the door. Nudge gasped and took a step back. The boy had two extra eyes, black as death and without a pupil in sight.
"Oh," Nudge said in a small voice.
"Livy and Remy are the only ones who can't fight," Dom said. "The rest of us can hold our own."
"Good, because we're going to need your help." Fang folded his arms across his chest. "Do you have any idea where the whitecoats set the bombs?"
Spider answered in a controlled voice with the faintest hint of an accent Fang couldn't place. An imported experiment? Itex stretched further than he'd realized. "The bottom level. It makes the most sense if they want to take the entire building out in one go."
"Can we make it past security in time?" Dom asked. "I mean, thanks to you guys, the Erasers are crawling all over this place."
Fang gave the older boy a dark glare and was about to point out that if they hadn't broken into the School, Dom would have been blown to smithereens, but Angel spoke up before he could say anything.
"We overheard a whitecoat say the bombs had less than thirty minutes before they went off."
"That gives us about twenty minutes left," Nudge concluded.
The bald girl with the antlers, Greta, stirred at this point and said in a whispery voice, "There's a large group of Erasers down on the last level. They've gathered around the docking bay, but a lot of them are leaving to search for you, so if we go now we can probably get past them."
Fang, Nudge and Angel stared at the quiet girl in surprise. Greta looked uncomfortably at her bare feet.
"Greta can sense people," Dom said in answer to the flock members' silent question. "She's not exactly a telepath, but she can sense people's life-auras. Or something like that."
Fang saw Angel's eyes widen in interest out of the corner of his eye. "You think they're hiding the bombs in the docking bay?" he asked, trying to steer the conversation back to its real point of focus. Angel gave him a withering look, no doubt reading his intentions, but he ignored her.
Greta nodded meekly in response to his question. "I think so," she said. "Also…earlier, I sensed a large group of whitecoats going through a tunnel linked to the back of the training room."
Spider wrinkled his forehead in concentration. Fang saw the boy's upper two eyes scrunch and fought back a shiver.
"But that's impossible," Spider said. "I've been to that training room. There's no tunnel in the back of it."
"A secret tunnel?" Nudge suggested, her eyes brightening.
"Probably," Fang answered. "It would make sense for the whitecoats to have an extra escape route."
Spider took a step forward and scooped Livy up in his arms. Her head lolled limply on his shoulder. "Then what are we wasting time for?" he asked. "Let's go."
The alarm was still shrilling when the eight children entered the hallway. Immediately, they were faced with a group of four Erasers. The wolf-mutants stopped in the process of investigating another room and stopped, open-mouthed.
"Go!" Fang shouted.
The eight mutants surged forward with Fang and Dom in front, and Spider, Livy and Remy in back. Fang punched an Eraser square in the face when it aimed its pistol at him, then slammed the wolf-mutant's head against another's. Both went down, unconscious.
Dom and Greta set to work on the next Eraser while Angel advanced on the last one, her eyes narrowed and her face lowered, cast into shadow. The Eraser blinked blearily and shook its head in confusion.
"You're going to go to sleep now," Angel said in an eerie voice. "You're really tired. Really, really tired. Sleep, sleep—"
The towering mutant was asleep on the floor before the six-year-old telepath was halfway through her chant.
"Over here!" Nudge cried. She'd opened the door to the stairwell and held it as Remy and Spider, still carrying a half-unconscious Livy in his arms, went through. Dom and Greta finished off their Eraser and darted through the doorway. Fang and Nudge came last.
"How many Erasers around the docking bay now, Greta?" Spider asked.
Greta's eyes went blank for a moment. Fang thought he saw Angel shiver and falter as the older girl reached out with her mind, looking several levels down.
"Seven," the pale-skinned girl answered after a moment. "It's going to be hard. They have guns."
"All Erasers have guns," Spider muttered darkly. Livy whimpered in his arms, prompting him to heft her into a more comfortable position.
"We're here," Angel breathed. Fang stopped several steps from the door and asked if they had a plan.
"I can get you in," Nudge said, cutting Dom off just as he opened his mouth. "I know how to hack into computers and stuff. I've never tried to dismantle a bomb before, but I totally think I could do it."
"Great," Spider said, grabbing onto the collar of Remy's shirt to draw him by his side. "We'll stay here. We don't want to get in your way."
"We're going in with you," Dom said before Fang could ask him. Greta nodded silently.
Leaving behind three of their members, the five mutants moved out of the stairwell and into the hallway. Fang went over the odds in his head.
Five against seven, he thought, them with guns and us with no weapons—except the meat knife Angel just pulled out of her pack. Of course.
This was going to be a piece of cake.
Dom and Greta led the way, since none of the flock members knew their way around this School. Even down at the lowest level of the gargantuan building, the alarm shrieked loudly and painfully, driving into Fang's ears like a red-hot stick. He resisted the urge to cover his ears and readied himself.
Just as they were about to round the corner that would lead them to the docking bay, Angel darted to the front of the group and held out a small hand. "Let me go first," she whispered almost silently. "I'll order them to set down their guns, and then I'll call you out."
Dom looked as if he was about to protest, but Fang put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head. To Angel he whispered, "Be careful. Give us a signal when it's time."
Angel nodded, yellow curls bouncing against her small shoulders, and stepped around the corner.
Fang's heart pounded in his chest. Please don't let me have killed her, please don't let me have sent her to her death…
Then Angel said in a clear, powerful tone, "Put down your guns."
Dom shot Fang an incredulous look and stepped forward. Fang jerked him back, hissing, "Don't go out there! If the Erasers see you and start firing, Angel will lose her concentration."
"Angel's a telepath," Nudge murmured. Dom's dark eyes widened in understanding.
"I said," Angel called loudly, "put down…your…guns. Now."
Something clattered against the tiled floor. Then one, two, three…six more guns followed the first out of their owners' hands.
Fang sighed in relief. Suddenly, a deep, foreboding growl rose in an Eraser's chest, and Angel cried, "Fang—"
The dark boy shot around the corner and tackled Angel to the floor, just as an Eraser leaped forward and slashed at her with its wicked claws. Angel shrieked. Fang released her, rolled to his feet, then slammed his fist into the Eraser's snout and his knee into his gut.
Nudge, Dom and Greta came around and sailed into the middle of the Erasers. Fang joined them with his fists swinging, crushing any Eraser nose that presented itself to himself, ramming his feet into breakable kneecaps, clapping his hands over Erasers' ears and popping eardrums. Everything was a mindless blur of dodge, swing, duck, kick, dodge again, swing again.
Finally, Fang whirled in a roundhouse kick, and Dom caught his foot mid-air with a raised eyebrow.
"Look around you, kid," he said. "There's no one to fight anymore."
Fang jerked his foot free and took a step back, breathing hard. The saber-toothed boy was right. The Erasers lay on a heap on the floor, sprawled at all angles. Fang couldn't believe that they had actually managed to take all of them down. Then again, they did have Angel and her creepy mind powers, and none of the Erasers had regained possession of their guns.
"Let's move," Dom said, stepping over a downed Eraser. "I bet more are on their way already."
The docking bay's doors were shut. Just the sight of them towering high above even Dom's tall form gave Fang an idea of how big the docking bay really was.
Nudge rushed to the control panel that kept the doors sealed shut. Her mocha-colored fingers flew over the keypad and screen, moving almost quickly enough to form a blur.
"Hurry, hurry," Angel said, bouncing anxiously on her heels. She sported a nasty bruise over one cheekbone and her knife was nowhere to be seen (Fang really hoped he didn't find it embedded in some Eraser), but she was bright-eyed and alert. "I think someone's coming."
Nudge stepped back and said, "There!" just as the doors slid open. Fang had been right; saying that the docking bay was huge was a massive understatement. Sitting in the middle of the cavernous room, surrounded on all sides by boxes and boxes full of explosives, were twenty bound children.
"Oh, my God," Nudge gasped.
The group broke into a run as the children saw them and began to scream for help through their gags. Nudge dropped to her knees beside a curly-haired girl with short horns and hurriedly began to untie the experiment's hands and feet.
"What is the point of this?" Greta breathed, staring at the bulging boxes filling half the docking bay. "Why put these kids here in the middle of all this?"
"Because Stark's a sick, twisted bastard," Dom snarled.
Angel wrapped her arms around herself. "Maybe because they caused more trouble?"
"No." Nudge shuddered. The curly-haired girl, once free, immediately lifted her tattered shirt to display her stomach. A ragged line of stitches wound itself across her pinkish middle, outlining a bulging, rectangular shape. Nudge went stock still as the girl leaned forward and whispered something in her ear.
"Mia!" Fang turned to see Remy and Spider standing at the docking bay's entrance, Livy still cradled in the saber-toothed boy's arms. Remy bounced eagerly on his feet and pointed to the girl Nudge had untied. "Mia!" he cried happily.
Nudge whirled as the boy started forward and screamed, "Keep him away from her!"
The winged girl's tone stopped the one-eyed boy in his tracks. Fang stared at Nudge, horror freezing his insides as tears welled in her eyes and spilled over.
"Don't let him near us," she gasped.
"Nudge." He bent down and put a hand on one of her shaking shoulders. "What's wrong?"
Nudge shook her head and gasped, "The…the reason these kids are with the bombs is… because they are bombs. Mia said that Stark took them and stitched bombs into them. Because…because he wanted to make sure that even if the government set them free and got them away from all of these bombs, the mutants would still die. Because he's not going to stop until we're all dead."
Fang closed his eyes. He hated this. He hated everything about this situation, hated the man who was about to be responsible for the deaths of yet more innocent children, hated that he was going to have to leave these kids behind. Because there was no way they would be able to get the bombs out fast enough. No way.
He didn't want to have to tell Nudge. Angel lifted her eyes to his, and he knew by the way her gaze dimmed that she'd read his mind.
"Nudge," he said, drawing her to her feet. "Come on. We have to get out of here."
She looked up at him with disbelief in her eyes. "What…what are you…?" she murmured. "Fang! You can't leave them here!"
"Nudge, I don't want to abandon them! But we can't save them. You can't even shut down all of the regular bombs in this room in time to save the building. We were stupid to think we could. The School's gonna go up in flames no matter what we do. But we can get as many mutants out of it before it blows."
Nudge shook her head furiously. Her shoulder trembled beneath his hand. "I can save them," she insisted. Her voice broke. "Please, Fang, I can—"
"You can what?" Fang let his tone turn harsh, even as Nudge backed away from him as if he'd slapped her. She needed to understand. He'd looked into one of the boxes and had seen the time. They barely had fourteen minutes left, and the seconds were slipping through their fingers. If they tried to save these kids, they were dead.
"Hey," Dom said, "we've got company."
Spider lifted Livy and grabbed Remy by the hand, leading them hastily away from the bay's entrance as it filled with Erasers. Fang clenched his fists and put himself squarely in front of Nudge. Angel drew close to his side, taking his hand in hers for support.
"Look at this!" A tall Eraser strode to the front of his group of wolf-mutants. He was lanky and lean, with wild dark hair and gleaming eyes. In one hand he clutched a walkie-talkie; in the other, a long, dark pistol.
"Just who Stark told us to keep an eye out for." The Eraser grinned, displaying jagged white teeth as long as Fang's little finger. "What are you doing in here, eh?"
He paused, his gaze drifting past Fang to Greta. The antler-headed girl had straightened from reaching into a box and held one of the heavy bombs in her thin hands. The Eraser narrowed his eyes.
"What is that?" he asked.
Fang blinked at the sudden fear in the wolf-mutant's voice. Angel squeezed Fang's hand and said, purposely raising her voice, "Fang, he doesn't know about the whitecoats' plan. None of them do. The whitecoats ordered them into the training room to distract them while they moved the explosives here."
The Eraser leaned forward. "I heard that, little squeaker," he said. "It's a sneaky, last-ditch effort to save your skin and I give you points for ingenuity, but it doesn't work on us."
"Really?" Spider passed Livy over to Dom and held his hands out in the universal gesture of submission. "Just listen to us. We don't want to die any more than you do. If the whitecoats aren't planning to blow this place, where are they? Why'd they take all their important files and run?"
The Erasers shifted uneasily. "They've been meanin' to exterminate us for months," one Eraser told his leader. "You should know, Dag. You went looking around for answers on that Extermination Effect."
Uncertainty entered Dag's dark eyes. Fang stretched his wings out, preparing himself in case he needed to fly out of the range of the Erasers' bullets; the wolf-mutants had a tendency to look to their weapons for comfort whenever they felt threatened. Dag stopped and pointed at Fang.
"You," he said, his eyes going wide. "You're like that blind kid, the one who was working on a way to stop the Extermination Effect."
Extermination Effect? Fang thought he remembered Iggy saying something about suffering from the Extermination Effect at Stark's hands, but when had he talked to an Eraser about that?
Fang, Angel's voice said in his head. Fang, tell him about Jeb's project. Tell him that Iggy came up with a way to stop the expiration date.
"Iggy?" Fang repeated. Dag started.
"That was his name!" he said. "He'd actually gotten somewhere with his spying."
"He's gotten more than somewhere," Fang said, culturing his voice into a more self-assured tone. "He's figured out how to stop the expiration date."
A ripple went through the gathered Erasers, like the waves that spread from a stone dropped into a still pond. "You're lying," Dag breathed. "That's imposs—"
"Do I look like I'm lying?" Fang gave the Eraser his sternest stare. "Iggy had help from a whitecoat named Jeb Batchelder. I know you've heard about him. Together, they solved it. And if you help us get out of here before the bombs go off, we'll tell them to give you the cure."
He watched the Erasers without blinking, studying the shock on their faces and the wavering uncertainty in Dag's gaze. Dag had doubted and mistrusted the whitecoats for a long time, it seemed, just like every other Eraser Fang had come into contact with. Dag believed that there was a way to solve the Extermination Effect. All it took was a little push…and some mind-manipulation from Angel, it turned out.
"We promise we'll help you if you help us," the little girl said. She stared the Erasers down, unblinking. "We know a way to get out of here, a secret way, and we have the cure for the expiration date. If you try to stop us, then the bombs will go off and we'll all explode. If you help us, we'll show you the way out of here, and save you from termination. It's the smartest thing to do."
It was amazing, how far Angel's powerful mind could reach. Fang watched the Erasers' eyes begin to glaze as Angel's words and mind-persuasion worked over them, coupling with their natural distrust and dislike of the whitecoats who had ordered them around and mistreated them ever since they'd left their test tubes.
"How much time till the bombs go off?" Dag asked.
Greta looked down at the device in her hands. "Twelve minutes."
"Hmm." Dag lifted his right hand, not the one that clutched the walkie-talkie, but the one that brandished a black pistol. "You do know, squeaker, that if you go back on this deal we'll blast you into shredded meat?"
"We won't go back on it," Fang said firmly. "And yeah, we know. The same goes for you if you cross us."
Dag barked out a laugh. "Look at this! A squeaker haggling with Erasers! Fine, kid, you have a deal. What's in it for you?"
This was it. Less than twelve minutes till the bombs went off, and they somehow had to get all the mutants out of the building.
They could make it. They had to.
"Evacuate this building of all experiments and get them into the training room," Fang commanded. "Don't hurt them. Don't bully them into it, either. Just get them all down there in less than ten minutes."
"I have men on every level," Dag said. "I can have your mutants down in five."
"Then do it. And don't forget our agreement."
Dag grinned toothily. "Not for the world, squeaker." Then, he spoke into his walkie-talkie, "Everyone. I had that on speakerphone, so by all rights, you should know what you gotta do. But if you don't, then get this: get all the squeakers down into the training room on the last level. The whitecoats've left us to burn. Literally. Get the mutants to the training room for evacuation in less than ten minutes or go up in flames."
There was a surge of movement in the Erasers' ranks as they moved to follow Dag's orders. Fang strode forward with every intention of helping free any mutant he could reach when Nudge gripped his wrist.
"Fang," she said, her eyes wide and pleading. She looked back to the bound children, who stared at them with nothing but misery and resignation in their eyes. They knew what was going to happen to them. They had accepted this awful truth.
The little girl named Mia picked up the rope that had been used to bind her hands. She gave it to Nudge and then reached out her wrists, wordlessly.
A sob escaped Nudge's lips. "I can't," she gasped, shaking her head so hard that her hair whipped her cheeks. "Please, I…I can't…"
Fang moved forward and took the rope from Nudge's shaking hands. "Let me do it," he said, and knelt to Mia's level. She stared at him with huge brown eyes, lightless and empty, as if whatever soul she'd once had was long gone. Fang looked down and began to bind her hands to her ankles once more.
"What are you doing?" Remy appeared at Fang's side, his one golden eye brimming with confusion and anger. "Let her go!"
Spider bent down and scooped up the smaller boy in his arms. "No!" Remy shouted, struggling with all his might as the saber-toothed boy carried him from the docking bay. "No, put me down! Put me down! Mia!"
Fang finished binding the girl's only means of escape and stood up. He hated himself for doing it. But if the girl panicked and tried to run after them, there was a full chance that someone would be killed when she…no. He wouldn't think about that.
"Let's get out of here," he said, and turned his back on the whole thing. Angel stayed close by his side, still holding his head.
After a pause, her silence heavy as lead on his shoulders, Nudge followed him without another word.
Don't think. Just move.
Fang worked as fast as he could, his fingers delving into locks on cages and dog crates alike as he set free child after child after child. He told himself that for every child he'd left behind in the docking bay, he was saving three more, four more, tens of children upon children, spared because he'd sacrificed the needs of the few for the needs of the many.
In other words, he'd pulled a Jeb. Now he understood a little bit of what the man had gone through. It hurt with such a deep, throbbing ache that he wondered how the ex-whitecoat hadn't broken under the pressure.
"Fang." Angel pulled on his sleeve again, drawing him out of his thoughts as he lifted a three-year-old boy with tentacles from his dog crate. "We should really get to the training room. We have less than five minutes before the bombs go off."
Crap! Fang lifted the three-year-old in his arms and waded through the crying, confused children that filled the hallways. There were so many…so, so many…how were they going to get them all through in time?
He found the training room filled to bursting with experiments and Erasers alike. The wolf-mutants were shouting at the experiments and the experiments were shouting back, throwing the entire room into a chaos of anger and confusion. Nudge stood at the back of the room, her hands skimming over the metal wall.
"I've found it," she said once he and Angel drew near. "All I need to do is press the right spots in a sequence, and…yes!"
Almost the entire wall swung back, opening like a gargantuan, hidden door. The training room suddenly went entirely silent save for the groaning of metal as the secret tunnel was revealed. The passageway itself was dark, lightless, a massive hole bored deep into the mountain's face that went on too far for Fang to find a spot where it curved.
For a precious second, there was absolute silence.
"Move!" an Eraser screamed.
The horde surged forward. Fang barely managed to jerk Nudge and Angel away from the tunnel's entrance before he was slammed against the wall. His head collided sharply with the metal, sending his ears ringing. The three-year-old screeched in his arms.
"Fang!"
A hand fisted in the front of his shirt just as he looked up to see Dom and Spider appear in front of him. Even as tall and broad-shouldered as they were, they were buffeted from all sides, pushed this way and that as if they were no bigger than Angel.
"What are you waiting for?" Dom yelled. "Get through!"
Nudge shouted over the chaos, "I have to stay back! I have to close the door behind us or the explosion will reach us anyway!"
Fang pushed Dom's fist from his shirt roughly. "I'm not leaving her behind."
Dom shrugged. "Your call." He reached out his arms for the boy with the tentacles. "Here, let me take him."
Fang handed the three-year-old over and watched as Dom and Spider, still carrying Livy and Remy, disappeared into the throng and passed into the tunnel. He caught a flash of Greta's antlers before she, too, was swallowed through.
"Fang!" Angel clutched her head in a panic. "Three minutes!"
No. Fang looked up. The crowd was thinning, thanks to the tunnel's entrance being as wide as it was, but there were still tens of mutants pouring in.
"We're not gonna make it," he whispered.
Somehow, despite the shouting and thundering of feet around them, Nudge heard him. "We'll make it!" she shouted. Her eyes were ablaze as he'd never seen them before. "Fang, we can make it! Look! There's the last of them!"
His heart caught in his throat as the last few mutants straggled through the training room's doorway. "Move," he said, and then he shouted it, raising his voice as loud as it would go, screaming because if the mutants didn't make it through in time he'd have to shut the door on them, and God help him, he was not going to sentence any more innocent kids to death today. "Move! Everyone, move!"
"Fang!" Angel shrieked. "One minute!"
The last mutants passed through, stumbling into the tunnel and leaving the training room empty save for Fang, Nudge and Angel.
"Nudge!" Fang threw Angel over his shoulder and raced through the tunnel's entrance. "Nudge, close it! Close it now!"
He didn't wait to see what she did. The darkness of the tunnel, lit dimly from behind by the lights in the training room, surrounded him on all sides. He felt like he was suffocating. Suffocating in a dark hole of rank, hot air and pushing bodies running in a wild, animal panic.
The tunnel's door groaned as it slid back into place. A sweaty hand encircled Fang's wrist.
"I'm here!" Nudge's voice cried in his ear. Cut off from the School, the tunnel was pitch black. Fang's eyes were so wide they felt like they would burst from their sockets.
"Keep moving!" he howled, pushing someone's shoulder when they stopped to take a breather.
"Thirty seconds!" Angel wailed. "Fang, I can feel it coming, it's coming in twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…"
Run. Fang's blood was on fire. Run. His heart sped so quickly it didn't feel like it was beating at all. Run. Someone crashed into him, knocking him against the tunnel's rock wall. He scratched his arm on the rough surface and picked himself up again, clutching Nudge's hand so tightly he felt blood gather beneath his fingernails. Angel's head bounced against his shoulder.
Run—
"Five," whispered Angel. "Four. Three. Two. One."
It sounded like the mountain was roaring. The tunnel floor shuddered beneath Fang's feet and he went down, his hands automatically reaching to protect Angel's head as he fell against unforgiving rock. Nudge landed against him. Her shriek filled his ears.
The sound of rending metal was so loud, even from the safe distance, that Fang thought for one wild, panic-driven moment that the tunnel's door hadn't been strong enough to hold back the blast, and any second now a wave of fire would come racing down to incinerate them all.
But nothing came. And finally, when the roar of the explosion and the shriek of ripping metal died down, the tunnel was left full of not fire and death, but the hot, hushed breathing of tens and tens of survivors.
Fang would never know who, exactly, laughed first. But someone did, short and loud and full of a shocked gratitude, and it was as if that single bark of laughter was a catalyst. Suddenly everyone, children and Erasers alike, were laughing and throwing their heads back, shouting and crying for joy.
Angel wrapped her arms around Fang's neck and neither wept nor laughed; she only held onto him and trembled. "Yes!" Nudge shouted, pumping her fist into the air. "Fang, we did it! We made it!"
Fang leaned back against the rock wall, exhausted, and only because no one could see it in the absolute black of the escape tunnel, he allowed himself a grin so wide it hurt his cheeks.
They had made it. They'd survived.
Stark—eat your heart out.
Nehemiah folded his hands in his lap and tapped his fingers restlessly. The miniscule movement was the only sign that betrayed his inner impatience; on the outside, he was as collected and emotionless as ever, watching his wristwatch count down the time till the School's destruction.
Only about a minute now.
He leaned back, settling into his seat and stared aimlessly out the helicopter's windshield. The world passed by in a mix of snowcapped mountains and sparse trees. Nehemiah was glad to leave this cold world behind. In many ways, it suited him with its frozen exterior. It had kept him safe and hidden for many years.
But now…now, he was about to venture straight into the heart of Itex. Perhaps he would not be as safe as before, nestled in a viper's nest of two-faced colleagues who were only out to usurp him. It was worth the risk. He enjoyed being presented with a challenge, especially when he crushed it in the end.
A small movement to his left caught Nehemiah's attention. Anne sat in the seat beside him, her back rigid to an almost painful degree as she stared unseeingly at the helicopter's floor. He knew without a doubt what plagued her feeble mind.
In the spirit of good, clean fun, he'd brought Anne to oversee the operations that integrated bombs into selected mutants' bodies. The look of horror on her face had been delicious. He almost wished he'd had a camera with him at the time. Anne might have done heinous things under his command, but for some inexplicable reason this particular operation, this turning mutants into living bombs, perturbed her.
Well…"perturbed" was a weak term for her reaction. She had barely spoken a word to him ever since and had taken to staring at her hands with a strange look on her face, as if she couldn't believe those fingers had had a part in opening a mutant and slipping a bomb inside it.
Nehemiah cast a quick glance down at his watch. "Very soon now," he said quietly. Just as he'd expected, Anne flinched violently at his side. He restrained a chuckle. What a fun toy she was, what a silly little thing! And since this was turning out to be a rather boring trip, he might as well play with her.
A string of words, mumbled and almost too quiet to hear, drifted from Anne's lips. Nehemiah tilted his head the slightest bit. Were those…hymns? From his favorite toy? How interesting. He'd never thought of her as a pious woman. To think, after all these years, she still managed to surprise him now and then. He'd made the right choice in choosing her as his plaything.
"Five," he said, cutting over her mumblings. "Four. Three. Two."
Anne went completely still. "One," Nehemiah drawled. The woman next to him shuddered and paled, almost seeming to collapse in her seat. He knew she was thinking of the children. Of the poor, poor children wired up to bombs and blasted into itty little bloody bits.
Silly, sentimental creature…
Out of the blue, a wonderful idea overtook Nehemiah's head. Moving slowly, subtly, making sure that no one noticed what he was doing, he reached over and took Anne's hand in his. She jumped and looked at him with wide brown eyes.
He smiled at her and leaned in close, touching his lips to her ear. "Let us pray," he whispered.
Anne stared at him with lips parted as he pulled back, her face flushed from his touch and filled with shock. Then, as he watched, eagerness and gratitude stole over her expression, filling her eyes with adoration and hope. She actually thought he felt guilty about what he had done? She thought he wanted, needed to repent? She thought they had something in common, did she?
Pathetic. He could have giggled for glee.
Anne nodded, bowed her head, closed her eyes and began to recite, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name…"
Carefully, Nehemiah withdrew his hand from hers and set it back on his lap. He leaned back comfortably into his seat, closed his eyes and let Anne's platitudes wash over him, allowing himself to enjoy this game he'd created for her, in which she served and served and only existed to amuse him in the end.
A/N: End chapter twenty-six.
For reach review you leave, Stark will receive one bad karma point. :D
On a more serious note, do please leave a review - I was a bit anxious about posting an Iggy-free chapter this time.
-Kimsa