Part 16
Adam stifled a yawn, rubbing both hands down his face as he glanced at the digital clock ticking away the seconds on the monitor next to him. Nearly dawn, he thought, wishing he could get out for a while, watch the sun come up and let it wash away the uncertainties of the night. But he knew that wouldn't bring him more than temporary respite from the matters that had kept him for the most part sleepless through the long hours since their hurried departure from the field of battle, just ahead of the incoming State police SWAT team who'd been alerted by a carefully worded anonymous phonecall to the presence of a heavily armed force engaged in homicidal activities.
He and Emma had arrived there barely in time to assist in Brennan's efforts to run interference for Jesse, though Adam had pushed the Helix to her theoretical limits, both on the remotely controlled flight back to Sanctuary once he'd talked Connie through giving him direct access, and on the return journey. He knew he shouldn't have been surprised to find the plane empty when it arrived back with them – the girl had, after all, shown little inclination for following anyone's orders but her own. But he thought, from her demeanour when Emma had located her hiding behind one of the box-like structures he now knew had been used as cells, that she might have learnt a salutary lesson. Time would tell, but she'd seemed almost pathetically willing to do as asked so far.
Her absence had, however, thrown up the problem of what to do with Joshua, since they patently couldn't leave him behind alone. The decision had been made for them, though, with the boy insisting he should come with them on the grounds his precognitive visions could give them advance warning of what was going on, and it had been far easier to just accept than waste precious time coming up with an alternative solution. Not that, when it came down to it, there had been any outwardly obvious benefit to having him along, but that could just have been because Adam had been far too taken up with keeping his people alive long enough to get them all onto the plane and out of there to notice.
Once on board, Brennan had been unwilling to abandon the clearly shocky and smoke-congested Shalimar to anyone else's care, though her own concern had been solely for news of Jesse. But he had – when ordered – left her long enough to get the plane on course for home before switching to autopilot. That had at least given Adam time to assure himself that she wasn't badly hurt, though the experience had certainly taken its toll on her. Fire was the one adversary that Shalimar couldn't call on her powers to defeat – on the contrary, it was those powers that allowed it victory over her – and he could foresee some lengthy sessions while she talked the damaging impact this would have had on her out of her system. Fear wasn't something she'd admit to easily, another facet of her feral side, and to be so badly affected – to the point of immobility – would take some getting past.
For now, though, with Emma's help he'd treated the physical trauma of the burns and the other injuries she'd picked up in ways he could only imagine, and persuaded her to let sleep start the healing process for the rest, even though left to her own devices she'd probably still be fretting here with him. But in truth there'd been nothing much any of them could do except wait and hope the morning brought some news they could act on.
Brennan was also asleep, finally, having spent a solid half hour beating the punch bag to within an inch of its life. Though he'd given a sketchy account of what had happened since he and Shalimar had been dropped off to investigate DeSalles' estate, Adam was quite sure there was more to be told, and that it wouldn't make pleasant listening. There was an anger in the elemental that couldn't quite be explained by Shalimar's close call, and the fact he needed to resort to physical violence – albeit on an inanimate object – to allow himself to unwind enough to rest spoke more eloquently than words of how disturbing the whole thing had been, even for a self-professed street-wise veteran like him.
Adam knew he should be thankful that they'd at least got the two of them out relatively unscathed, though he couldn't say what the on-going impact of their team mate's current situation would be when they woke up.
Needing something to distract him from that thought, he absently picked up one of the collars they'd been wearing, turning it over in his hands as he looked for indications of its origins. They'd proved hard to unlock, but had finally yielded to one of his tools, and once Brennan had explained what they were he'd put them aside to examine when he had more time. But they were of unfamiliar construction, which alarmed him a little; Genomex had, for the most part, been a known quantity, and the thought of some other unknown body out there willing and able to manufacture mutant-specific restraints didn't bode well for the future.
He realised that he'd been staring blankly at the thing for some minutes and gave himself a mental kick. He wasn't doing much good sitting around here, not when a member of his family was in need of help. And that thought sent him to his feet with a renewed sense of purpose.
**
"Death!"
The single word vaulted into the hot humid air, reverberating around the semi-circle of low hills bordering the open space to be picked up and passed on by those perched on the slopes, the sound swelling with every second until it became a deafening roar.
Kneeling in the centre of the dusty arena the lone figure heard the initial decree, heard it lose itself in the wall of noise that threatened to pound him into the rocky ground, and struggled to understand. But his senses, already dulled by pain and fatigue, seemed unable to tell him more than the fact that this probably wasn't good. But then again, as things had already hit rock bottom, how much worse could they actually get?
Not all bad, though, right? And he stole a furtive look into the corner of his heart where he'd been carefully hiding the one thing that was keeping him going, frightened that they would find a way to take even that from him as they had everything else. But he found it still shining brightly, and he took strength from it. Because she was safe, and whatever happened to him here, now, he would know that in the end he hadn't failed her.
Or had he? Barely audible whispers brushed across the edges of his mind, conveying regret, disillusion, wrongness, and though he pushed them away the memory of them lingered.
His head drooped forward, exposing the back of his neck to the sun that scorched down across his bare shoulders. Sweat dripped off his forehead into the dirt, slid from his hairline into his eyes, trickled slowly down his spine and across his ribs, seeping into the open cuts and burns it found there. But with his hands cuffed painfully tightly behind his back he had no way of preventing its stinging ingress, and the pressure of the band clinging seductively round his throat taunted him with its ability to control and confine him to so-called normality again.
He became slowly aware that the clamour was changing, building in volume but becoming clearer as the individual voices synchronised into one and the crowd howled out their demand. He lifted his head slowly, blinking bleary eyes to focus on the black-clad man approaching him, feeling the dark gaze boring into him, the solemn, almost regretful expression at odds with the words he was intoning in time with the mob. Beyond this one stood another, though, face alight with avid anticipation, tongue sliding out to moisten thin lips with a hint of depravity that sent a shudder of revulsion through him.
He knew he should move, try to free himself from his bonds, from the other restraint which prevented him from using that which made him different – that which had gotten him into this situation in the first place – but it was already too late. The machete in the man's hand raised, the light catching its sharpened edge as it reached the top of its arc and paused before, riding on a final scream of "Death to freaks!", it plunged down to slash at flesh and bone and took him hurtling through a lifetime-long flash of crimson agony into nothingness...
**
With a grimace, Adam leant forward to check another readout, disturbed to see levels of activity that he would never have expected, even given the circumstances. By rights things should have started to stabilise by then, but what he was seeing was so inconsistent he had to check every reading twice to be sure he wasn't imagining it.
There was no mistake, though, and if he hadn't known better his first thought would have been that this was another dream. But with Joshua so close at hand, there was no reason for that to be the case – he would simply tell them what he'd seen, without the need to resort to telepathic disclosure – wouldn't he?
Whatever the cause, however, there was one thing certain – Jesse was still a long way from being out of danger.
Adam had thought they'd lost him when he'd seen him go down in full view of the remaining soldiers, especially when he'd caught sight of the wild-eyed madness lighting the face of Warren DeSalles as he'd stalked round the fire's perimeter brandishing a sword, obviously intent on destroying the only one of those who'd ruined his sport still within his reach. But the arrival of the police helicopters had created more confusion amongst the milling enemy, men running in every direction as they tried to escape.
All except one – as Adam had started forward with some vague and desperate aim of somehow snatching Jesse out of harm's way, a single figure had walked purposefully up to DeSalles and, producing a pistol from the holster on his belt, had calmly shot him in the head execution-style before turning and disappearing into the night. So Adam had taken his chance, darting forward with Emma at his heels as watchdog to hoist the unexpectedly light younger man over his shoulder and carry him to the shelter of the cloaked Helix waiting at the far side of the field.
There'd been nothing much he could do for him until they'd reached Sanctuary, beyond making him as comfortable as possible in the back of a plane that was looking more and more like an air ambulance with each flight, but he knew he had a sick boy on his hands. The external evidence of his ordeal – the cuts and bruises, and the burns liberally scattered across his body, especially his lower legs – was relatively easy to deal with. But the incessant shivering and high fever he was running, allied to the difficulty he was having breathing, had gone a long way towards crushing Adam's hopes of having prevented the onset of pneumonia.
Nonetheless, the treatment he'd given him should have been enough to alleviate the symptoms and at least make some inroads into dealing with the root cause, and the fact that it hadn't meant he needed to be looking elsewhere for an answer to what he was seeing.
He'd promised himself he would go and check the police reports once there'd been time for them to have been filed in the central databases, see what the outcome of the police raid had been, but he was frankly unwilling to leave Jesse right now. Wishing he hadn't insisted that Emma go and get some rest, he started re-checking the monitors in the hope an alternative solution would present itself.
**
...and then...
"Death!"
The same place, the same ruling handed down by the same falsely pious judge, taken up by the same raucous audience, the same noise and heat and dust and sweat and pain and all consuming weariness.
But as he waited on his knees, head bowed in hopeless anticipation of the end, his mind was awash with conflicting images of Shalimar burning, Shalimar carried to safety, unable to say for sure any more which was the truth. And the whispers grew in intensity, asserting their own veracity on his wavering belief, so that by the time the gray-eyed executioner appeared in front of him he'd come to understand that the punishment being meted out was as much for what he'd been unable to do as for what and who he was.
He shifted his gaze enough to see the hot sunlight flashing on the cold steel of the 7 inch K-Bar knife the man carried in his hand, watched him disappear from view behind him. And as the tumultuous cries reached their climax again, he felt the hand twist into his hair to yank his head firmly back, exposing his throat to the pitiless blade and a different kind of everlasting agony that sent his life gushing out in a scarlet flood to stain the ground in front of his fading eyes before the merciful blackness finally descended...
****
Adam stifled a yawn, rubbing both hands down his face as he glanced at the digital clock ticking away the seconds on the monitor next to him. Nearly dawn, he thought, wishing he could get out for a while, watch the sun come up and let it wash away the uncertainties of the night. But he knew that wouldn't bring him more than temporary respite from the matters that had kept him for the most part sleepless through the long hours since their hurried departure from the field of battle, just ahead of the incoming State police SWAT team who'd been alerted by a carefully worded anonymous phonecall to the presence of a heavily armed force engaged in homicidal activities.
He and Emma had arrived there barely in time to assist in Brennan's efforts to run interference for Jesse, though Adam had pushed the Helix to her theoretical limits, both on the remotely controlled flight back to Sanctuary once he'd talked Connie through giving him direct access, and on the return journey. He knew he shouldn't have been surprised to find the plane empty when it arrived back with them – the girl had, after all, shown little inclination for following anyone's orders but her own. But he thought, from her demeanour when Emma had located her hiding behind one of the box-like structures he now knew had been used as cells, that she might have learnt a salutary lesson. Time would tell, but she'd seemed almost pathetically willing to do as asked so far.
Her absence had, however, thrown up the problem of what to do with Joshua, since they patently couldn't leave him behind alone. The decision had been made for them, though, with the boy insisting he should come with them on the grounds his precognitive visions could give them advance warning of what was going on, and it had been far easier to just accept than waste precious time coming up with an alternative solution. Not that, when it came down to it, there had been any outwardly obvious benefit to having him along, but that could just have been because Adam had been far too taken up with keeping his people alive long enough to get them all onto the plane and out of there to notice.
Once on board, Brennan had been unwilling to abandon the clearly shocky and smoke-congested Shalimar to anyone else's care, though her own concern had been solely for news of Jesse. But he had – when ordered – left her long enough to get the plane on course for home before switching to autopilot. That had at least given Adam time to assure himself that she wasn't badly hurt, though the experience had certainly taken its toll on her. Fire was the one adversary that Shalimar couldn't call on her powers to defeat – on the contrary, it was those powers that allowed it victory over her – and he could foresee some lengthy sessions while she talked the damaging impact this would have had on her out of her system. Fear wasn't something she'd admit to easily, another facet of her feral side, and to be so badly affected – to the point of immobility – would take some getting past.
For now, though, with Emma's help he'd treated the physical trauma of the burns and the other injuries she'd picked up in ways he could only imagine, and persuaded her to let sleep start the healing process for the rest, even though left to her own devices she'd probably still be fretting here with him. But in truth there'd been nothing much any of them could do except wait and hope the morning brought some news they could act on.
Brennan was also asleep, finally, having spent a solid half hour beating the punch bag to within an inch of its life. Though he'd given a sketchy account of what had happened since he and Shalimar had been dropped off to investigate DeSalles' estate, Adam was quite sure there was more to be told, and that it wouldn't make pleasant listening. There was an anger in the elemental that couldn't quite be explained by Shalimar's close call, and the fact he needed to resort to physical violence – albeit on an inanimate object – to allow himself to unwind enough to rest spoke more eloquently than words of how disturbing the whole thing had been, even for a self-professed street-wise veteran like him.
Adam knew he should be thankful that they'd at least got the two of them out relatively unscathed, though he couldn't say what the on-going impact of their team mate's current situation would be when they woke up.
Needing something to distract him from that thought, he absently picked up one of the collars they'd been wearing, turning it over in his hands as he looked for indications of its origins. They'd proved hard to unlock, but had finally yielded to one of his tools, and once Brennan had explained what they were he'd put them aside to examine when he had more time. But they were of unfamiliar construction, which alarmed him a little; Genomex had, for the most part, been a known quantity, and the thought of some other unknown body out there willing and able to manufacture mutant-specific restraints didn't bode well for the future.
He realised that he'd been staring blankly at the thing for some minutes and gave himself a mental kick. He wasn't doing much good sitting around here, not when a member of his family was in need of help. And that thought sent him to his feet with a renewed sense of purpose.
**
"Death!"
The single word vaulted into the hot humid air, reverberating around the semi-circle of low hills bordering the open space to be picked up and passed on by those perched on the slopes, the sound swelling with every second until it became a deafening roar.
Kneeling in the centre of the dusty arena the lone figure heard the initial decree, heard it lose itself in the wall of noise that threatened to pound him into the rocky ground, and struggled to understand. But his senses, already dulled by pain and fatigue, seemed unable to tell him more than the fact that this probably wasn't good. But then again, as things had already hit rock bottom, how much worse could they actually get?
Not all bad, though, right? And he stole a furtive look into the corner of his heart where he'd been carefully hiding the one thing that was keeping him going, frightened that they would find a way to take even that from him as they had everything else. But he found it still shining brightly, and he took strength from it. Because she was safe, and whatever happened to him here, now, he would know that in the end he hadn't failed her.
Or had he? Barely audible whispers brushed across the edges of his mind, conveying regret, disillusion, wrongness, and though he pushed them away the memory of them lingered.
His head drooped forward, exposing the back of his neck to the sun that scorched down across his bare shoulders. Sweat dripped off his forehead into the dirt, slid from his hairline into his eyes, trickled slowly down his spine and across his ribs, seeping into the open cuts and burns it found there. But with his hands cuffed painfully tightly behind his back he had no way of preventing its stinging ingress, and the pressure of the band clinging seductively round his throat taunted him with its ability to control and confine him to so-called normality again.
He became slowly aware that the clamour was changing, building in volume but becoming clearer as the individual voices synchronised into one and the crowd howled out their demand. He lifted his head slowly, blinking bleary eyes to focus on the black-clad man approaching him, feeling the dark gaze boring into him, the solemn, almost regretful expression at odds with the words he was intoning in time with the mob. Beyond this one stood another, though, face alight with avid anticipation, tongue sliding out to moisten thin lips with a hint of depravity that sent a shudder of revulsion through him.
He knew he should move, try to free himself from his bonds, from the other restraint which prevented him from using that which made him different – that which had gotten him into this situation in the first place – but it was already too late. The machete in the man's hand raised, the light catching its sharpened edge as it reached the top of its arc and paused before, riding on a final scream of "Death to freaks!", it plunged down to slash at flesh and bone and took him hurtling through a lifetime-long flash of crimson agony into nothingness...
**
With a grimace, Adam leant forward to check another readout, disturbed to see levels of activity that he would never have expected, even given the circumstances. By rights things should have started to stabilise by then, but what he was seeing was so inconsistent he had to check every reading twice to be sure he wasn't imagining it.
There was no mistake, though, and if he hadn't known better his first thought would have been that this was another dream. But with Joshua so close at hand, there was no reason for that to be the case – he would simply tell them what he'd seen, without the need to resort to telepathic disclosure – wouldn't he?
Whatever the cause, however, there was one thing certain – Jesse was still a long way from being out of danger.
Adam had thought they'd lost him when he'd seen him go down in full view of the remaining soldiers, especially when he'd caught sight of the wild-eyed madness lighting the face of Warren DeSalles as he'd stalked round the fire's perimeter brandishing a sword, obviously intent on destroying the only one of those who'd ruined his sport still within his reach. But the arrival of the police helicopters had created more confusion amongst the milling enemy, men running in every direction as they tried to escape.
All except one – as Adam had started forward with some vague and desperate aim of somehow snatching Jesse out of harm's way, a single figure had walked purposefully up to DeSalles and, producing a pistol from the holster on his belt, had calmly shot him in the head execution-style before turning and disappearing into the night. So Adam had taken his chance, darting forward with Emma at his heels as watchdog to hoist the unexpectedly light younger man over his shoulder and carry him to the shelter of the cloaked Helix waiting at the far side of the field.
There'd been nothing much he could do for him until they'd reached Sanctuary, beyond making him as comfortable as possible in the back of a plane that was looking more and more like an air ambulance with each flight, but he knew he had a sick boy on his hands. The external evidence of his ordeal – the cuts and bruises, and the burns liberally scattered across his body, especially his lower legs – was relatively easy to deal with. But the incessant shivering and high fever he was running, allied to the difficulty he was having breathing, had gone a long way towards crushing Adam's hopes of having prevented the onset of pneumonia.
Nonetheless, the treatment he'd given him should have been enough to alleviate the symptoms and at least make some inroads into dealing with the root cause, and the fact that it hadn't meant he needed to be looking elsewhere for an answer to what he was seeing.
He'd promised himself he would go and check the police reports once there'd been time for them to have been filed in the central databases, see what the outcome of the police raid had been, but he was frankly unwilling to leave Jesse right now. Wishing he hadn't insisted that Emma go and get some rest, he started re-checking the monitors in the hope an alternative solution would present itself.
**
...and then...
"Death!"
The same place, the same ruling handed down by the same falsely pious judge, taken up by the same raucous audience, the same noise and heat and dust and sweat and pain and all consuming weariness.
But as he waited on his knees, head bowed in hopeless anticipation of the end, his mind was awash with conflicting images of Shalimar burning, Shalimar carried to safety, unable to say for sure any more which was the truth. And the whispers grew in intensity, asserting their own veracity on his wavering belief, so that by the time the gray-eyed executioner appeared in front of him he'd come to understand that the punishment being meted out was as much for what he'd been unable to do as for what and who he was.
He shifted his gaze enough to see the hot sunlight flashing on the cold steel of the 7 inch K-Bar knife the man carried in his hand, watched him disappear from view behind him. And as the tumultuous cries reached their climax again, he felt the hand twist into his hair to yank his head firmly back, exposing his throat to the pitiless blade and a different kind of everlasting agony that sent his life gushing out in a scarlet flood to stain the ground in front of his fading eyes before the merciful blackness finally descended...
****