Chapter 5: The Attack
"Hank!"
Jean's shocked exclamation (both vocal and telepathic) brought half the rest of the mansion's residents flocking to the front door. Ororo ran to him, anxiously inspecting the bloodstains on his now-wrinkled white dress shirt. "Hank, what has happened?"
Hank looked down at the bloodstains on his shirt. "It is nothing; it is not my blood. It is Amanda's," he said.
"Amanda's?" Jubilee ran into the front hall. "What happened to her?"
"We were accosted outside the Rialto Theater last night after the ten o'clock showing of 'Phantom of the Opera' by five street youths," Hank said, resigned. He had been hoping to slip up to his room with a minimum of fuss, but Jean's telepathic exclamation had nullified that option. "They decided to express their displeasure at Amanda's choice of company by hurling concrete missiles at both of us. She was struck by a brick; I took her home."
Jubilee gasped. "Is she all right?"
"The wound was superficial," Hank said. "A simple cleaning and an application of antiseptic ointment was sufficient to relieve her discomfort."
"I'm going to go call her!" Jubilee turned and dashed up the stairs.
Hank shrugged out of his suit jacket and began to unbutton his shirt as he climbed the stairs to his own room, shaking his head. There were disadvantages to living in a mansion with other people, and one of those disadvantages was the fact that everybody knew everyone elses' business. He would have preferred to keep his relationship with Amanda private, but it was next to impossible to keep anything secret in a house with a telepath. And this particular house had four.
He opened his room door, walked inside, shut the door…and saw who was waiting inside for him. He sighed and pulled his shirt off. "I assume you are going to admonish me on the disruption of order in your house," he said to the visitor.
"Not at all," Charles Xavier said amiably, moving his personal transport out of the corner of the room where it had been while he examined Hank's wall hanging of the Periodic Table. "Is Amanda all right? I assume she is, or you would have remained with her."
"She seemed all right last night," Hank said as he pulled a fresh T-shirt from his drawer and pulled it over his head, "But I was intending to stop here and refresh myself before returning to her apartment."
"Did you spend the night with her?"
Hank said quietly, "Yes."
Xavier smiled to himself, though Hank couldn't see it. "I trust you took appropriate…measures…"
Hank froze. "I did not consider the possible ramifications," he admitted. "However, as she was the one who initiated it, I would think that she has invested in some form of personal protection."
Xavier wanted to laugh. It had been a long time since Hank had engaged in a physical relationship with anyone, and it had apparently been long enough for him to forget some of the fringe concerns.
He sensed Hank's increasing discomfort with the conversation and steered the discussion down a safer avenue. "While you were there, did you have a chance to ask her about her virus samples?"
"Amanda mentioned that her work had been pirated by her former fiancé and she was therefore reluctant to trust anyone else with the samples of the reovirus currently in her possession." Hank took a deep breath, preparing to ask Xavier the question that had been bugging him last night.
Xavier sensed Hank's hesitation and guessed the cause. "Why not bring her and her samples here? I am fairly sure that the laboratory downstairs has whatever she requires to carry out her research."
Hank spun. "You would not mind?"
Xavier shook his head. "As long as you take the necessary precautions and remove all the Shi'ar technology from anywhere that she might see it, then I see no reason why she shouldn't come here to work. Her research has a great deal of potential for both humans and mutants alike, and it would be a shame if she couldn't carry it out to its logical conclusion for lack of facilities."
Hank nodded. "Thank you, Charles. I was thinking somewhat along the same lines, but was uncertain how to approach you on this point."
There was a knock on the door, and Hank said, "Come in."
Jubilee opened the door and poked her head in. "Hank, I tried to call Amanda, and there's no answer. Do you think she might be teaching a weekend class at the college?"
Hank checked his watch. "She did not mention such to me, but she did have an errand to run, so she may be out. I shall wait a short while before venturing out to her apartment."
* * *
Amanda closed her door and sagged down on the floor behind it. Oh, it had been such a long while since she had been in love with someone. She felt giddy, like a teenager in love, and giggled as she got up and went to her room.
Her bed lay in pieces on the floor. Upon closer inspection, it was only the frame that had suffered damage. It had collapsed under Hank's weight. The mattress and boxspring were fine.
She started to pull the pieces of the frame out from under the bed. They were fine as well. The collapse had occurred from all of Hank's weight coming down on the exact point that the arms of the frame were bolted together. The bolt had broken.
She thought she might be able to fix it by simply replacing the bolt, but then she stopped to think. She fully intended to have Hank over again, for the night, and fairly soon. Certainly before she was going to be able to afford to buy a new bed. If the frame failed once, it would likely fail again. It made more sense to just put the mattress on the floor.
It took the better part of an hour to pull all the pieces of the heavy metal frame out from under the bed, and she was tired when she finally got all of it heaped in the middle of the living room floor. She stopped for a drink of water, and was contemplating her next move when there came a knock on her door.
Her eyes lit up. Hank had said he would be coming back. She hadn't expected him back quite so soon, but if he was here then he could help her carry the metal beams down the two flights of stairs to the dumpster outside. She ran to answer the door.
A man was standing outside the door to her apartment, accompanied by three others. "Can I help you?" she asked politely, puzzled. She didn't recognize them.
The man reached out and gave the door a hard shove against her shoulder. She stumbled backward, and he and his friends pushed their way in. Two of them grabbed Amanda and dragged her backward as the other two closed her apartment door. Amanda struggled against them, ineffectually, and cried out, "Get out! You're trespassing! I'm going to call the police!"
The first man looked her over, up and down, appraisingly. "You attended a ten o'clock showing at the Rialto last night? With an escort?"
Amanda drew herself up to her full height. "And if I did, I really don't see what business of it is yours."
The man slapped her, hard. Amanda staggered under the force of the blow, her eyes watering in pain. "What did you do that for?" she exclaimed.
"Your mutie boyfriend attacked my sons," he hissed at her. "They followed you here, they saw which apartment was yours, and told me."
Amanda narrowed her eyes. "Did your son inform you that he attacked me first?" she said hotly. "He threw a brick at me! Hank was just defending me!"
"Oh, the freak has a name," the man said mockingly. He leaned in, so close she could smell the onions on his breath. "That freak's kind ain't got no right to go attacking nobody," he snapped. "And you freak lovers ought to stay away from decent folk like me and my boys."
Amanda stared at him incredulously. "We're all human," she said evenly. "Just because he doesn't look the same as you do doesn't give you the right to persecute him. Or me, for my choice of loving him."
"You love him?" A muscle worked furiously in his jaw for a moment. "How can you love a freak like that?"
"Hank is a kind, caring, loving, compassionate man," she said firmly. "I am proud to know him, and I love him."
"You love him? Or his cock?" the man said crudely.
Amanda snorted. "Not everything in life revolves around sex," she said. "I love him for what he is, not for what he's like in bed."
"And I bet he said he loves you," the man said. "I wonder if he loves you for you, or if he just loves having a pretty girl on his arm."
"My looks have nothing to do with it," Amanda said.
He raised an eyebrow. "Really? Let's test that theory, shall we?"
His fist impacted with Amanda's cheekbone with such force that his two friends lost their grip on her and she fell backward against the wall. He stepped up closer to her, tangled his fingers in her long hair and shoved her head into the wall. Dazed from the blow, she sagged down the wall and knelt there for a moment before trying to crawl away from them.
One of the other guys grabbed her ankle, preventing her from crawling away as the first man dealt three swift kicks to her ribs. Amanda cried out in pain, curling up to try to protect her stomach. A third man grabbed her wrists, and between the two of them they stretched her out. The third man grabbed a leg of her bed frame and set about smashing everything he could reach with it.
The first man reached over and grabbed another piece of the bed frame lying in the pile on the floor. He hefted it in his fist, swung it a few times like a club, then grabbed it in both hands and brought it crashing down into her stomach. Amanda couldn't even scream this time, as the makeshift club smashed into her diaphragm and drove the air out of her lungs. He didn't give her time to regain it; his blows descended on her stomach, fast and hard, and she writhed in pain.
He rained blows down on her body, leaving great bruises and welts on her ribs, legs, and arms. She passed out briefly when he brought the metal club down on her shoulder, the force of the blow dislocating her arm, but he stopped his beating, slapped her bruised face repeatedly until she regained consciousness, and continued.
She started to vomit from the agony in her body; but being held as she was on her back, she couldn't get her mouth and throat clear, and she started to panic as she fought for air. Bile filled her throat and nasal cavities as she tried to scream, but she couldn't clear an airway, and she stopped thrashing as her body concentrated on getting the necessary air into her lungs. The man holding her arms dropped them as bloody vomit splashed from her mouth and smeared his shoe, and the other man dropped her legs. Amanda rolled over, her entire body screaming in agony, and threw up miserably into her carpet.
The first man didn't pause. He rained blows down on her back, buttocks, and shoulders, and Amanda finally got enough air into her lungs to scream as he smashed his club into her kidneys. The scream echoed in the apartment, and seconds later, the phone rang. The four men froze. The phone rang again.
The guy who had held her arms grabbed the first man's arm. "Come on, Mike," he snapped anxiously. "Somebody musta heard her and is calling to see what's wrong. Come on, let's go." It took a few more tugs, but Mike finally acquiesced to his friend's demand, and dropped the beam. Amanda barely noticed when they left; she was in too much pain.
She roused from her agonized stupor when she heard her answering machine pick up. Her own voice echoed cheerfully through the devastated apartment "I'm not home right now, but if you leave a message, I'll call you back when I get in." Beep.
"Hey, Amanda!" came a cheerful voice from the machine. " It's Jubilee. Hank just got home and told us about what happened last night. I know he said you were all right, but I wanted to hear from you. Pick up, huh?"
Amanda dug her bloody fingers into the carpet and tried to drag herself across the carpet to where the phone sat on a low table beside the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. Agony exploded through her body and she wept in pain. She wanted to just curl up on the floor and allow unconscious to claim her, to take her away from the raw well of pain that was her body, but she couldn't afford to give into that urge if she wanted to live. Some distant part of her mind was running a catalogue of her injuries; bruised kidneys, broken ribs, a punctured lung, fractured hip and thigh, dislocated arm, assorted bruises, welts, and from the looks of what she'd thrown up, internal bleeding and a concussion…but she ignored it, trying to concentrate only on getting to that phone. Inch by painful inch, she pulled herself across the floor, using one arm and her legs to propel herself. She wanted desperately to get there before Jubilee hung up.
Jubilee's voice paused for a moment, then she said, "I guess you're not there. Call me when you get in, or I'll call you later, okay? Bye!"
"No!" Amanda cried as the machine clicked off. "No, please, God, no," and unable to stay conscious any longer, she sank into darkness.
* * *
Hank dusted his hands off as he looked around his lab. Every piece of Shi'ar technology was moved out of the room, even Jubilee's isolated reaction chamber. Jubilee was moaning about it. "So how long am I going to have to keep my chamber in my room?" she grumped.
"I do not know," he said. "I do not know if Amanda will consent to continuing her research here."
"Oh, come on, Hank," Jubilee stamped her foot impatiently. "She stayed with Bruce for several years just so she could have access to his labs to continue her research. You honestly think she's going to turn down the chance to work here?" she spread her arms wide to indicate the lab. "Especially if you're going to be working with her? Your presence will just be icing on the cake for her."
Hank's cheeks turned almost purple as he blushed. "Jubilee," he began, but she cut him off.
"Did you think we didn't know? Hank, you've never spent the night away from the mansion since most of us can remember. And Logan smelled a woman's scent on you the minute you came in. You know how keen his sense of smell is. And if that didn't clue us in, we'd have to be blind not to see the idiotic grin all over your face since you came in. You got laid last night."
He was torn between amusement that he was that predictable, embarrassment that he'd been that obvious, and indignation that Jubilee would use such a crude term to describe what had happened between himself and Amanda. Jubilee's eyes twinkled as she grinned at him, and he sighed as he surrendered. "Yes, Amanda and I shared physical intimacy last night."
Jubilee laughed. "You and Amanda. I never would have guessed. So now she's coming here to work with you." She leaned over and kissed his cheek quickly. "I hope it works out; you're both too lonely and wrapped up in your work. It'll do both of you good to have each other." She turned and left the lab, Hank staring bemused at her retreating back.
He checked the clock as he got into his car. He hoped Amanda was back by now…but she'd given him a copy of her apartment key, anyway, and if he had to he could wait for her inside.
He got out of the car and walked up the steps to her apartment, where he lifted his hand to knock before he looked down and saw the footprint on the clean gray floor of the hallway. It had belonged to a foot whose owner had walked through some foreign material and left reddish-brown marks on the floor. He could also detect smears as the shoe had slipped on the linoleum. He suddenly sniffed; there was the distinct metallic scent of blood in the air.
His eyes traveled upward, from the smear on the floor to another smear of the same color and composition on the doorknob. As he lifted his hand and knocked, the impact of his knuckle moved the door back a few centimeters.
The hair rose on the back of his neck. Amanda didn't seem like the type to carelessly leave the door unlocked. He placed his hand against the door and slowly pushed it open, his muscles tense in the expectation of trouble.