Chapter 7: The Friends of Humanity
Amanda moaned.
The first thing she was aware of as she awoke was the fact that she was cold. Then came the fact that she was hurting. She tried to open her eyes, but found that something was preventing her from doing that.
"Bruce!" she screamed, thankful at least that she wasn't gagged. "Get me out of here, Bruce! I swear I'm going to kill you!"
There was a movement near her face, a slight breath of air against her cheek, and she felt a hand pull off the cloth tied tightly around her head, covering her eyes. "Not really in a position to be making threats, are you?" came Bruce's voice, mildly sarcastic.
Amanda squinted. She was hanging in the middle of a circle of light, thick metal shackles fastened around her wrists and ankles, and chains running off from them out into the darkness. The cold came from the fact that she was completely nude; the pain from the fact that she was spread-eagled in midair, the chains attached to her shackles pulled so tight her muscles were screaming. The surrounding area was so dark she couldn't see anything outside the circle of light, but she got the impression of a large space. And she also got the impression that there was someone else out there in that darkness. "Hello?" she called out. "If there's someone else out there, tell this maniac to let me go!"
A harsh laugh came up out of the darkness, and Jason Frank stepped into the light. He walked around her, languidly smoking his cigar, and came to a stop finally in front of her. He looked her up and down, his greedy eyes devouring every inch of her nude body, and laughed unpleasantly again. "You think we should let this mutie freak go?" he said loudly.
"No!" came a chorus of voices. Amanda would have jumped in shock if she hadn't been so tightly restrained. The room was a lot larger than she had thought, and there were a lot more people in it than she had guessed.
"Tell me," the man said, walking around her again, "Do you like the way you look now? Your fiancé showed me pictures of what you looked like before you changed. You were almost pretty then; now you're a misshapen, ugly freak." He stopped behind her, and leaned in over her shoulder to whisper in her ear. "You can't like the way you look now."
It was on the tip of her tongue to say she hated the way she looked, but she reconsidered. She suddenly realized that she didn't mind anymore; in fact, she did like her looks. She loved being able to fly; she loved the free feeling she got when she flew. "I don't mind it," she said finally. "I did at first; but now it's not as bad. I love being able to fly."
"You like looking like a freak? You like the stares you get?" he stood back, resumed his slow pacing around her. "How about that bottle my friend threw at you in the airport terminal? Did you like that?"
"Absolutely not!" Amanda struggled in her bonds, but succeeded only in dragging the shackles through the abrasions on her wrists again. Her hands were numb; she couldn't feel her fingers or toes anymore, and her arm and leg muscles were shaking from the strain. She bit her lip.
He saw the movement. "Feeling a bit uncomfortable?" he said. "How do you think we humans feel when confronted with your kind in the airport? Or a bus, or a school. Or a shopping mall? We're just as uncomfortable around your kind." He took a long, thoughtful drag on his cigar. "You ever had a small pain somewhere, like a paper cut, and then you get injured somewhere else, and the first pain doesn't seem so bad anymore? Well, it works the same way for us. We feel damned uncomfortable with your kind around; but when we get the chance to strike out at you, and we take that opportunity, the pain we feel eases a bit."
Amanda felt him grab her left wing; the nerves in the veining, though widely spaced and not as sensitive as other nerves in her body, were still sensitive enough to pick up touch. He ran his hand down the high arch of the wing, then took the cigar out of his mouth and pressed it against an area of her wing thick with veining.
For a second she was silent. Then agony exploded in her wing and she screamed hysterically as the smell of burning leaves filled her nose. Frank held the cigar to her wing for a moment more, then withdrew it. Amanda turned her head to look at her wing, and saw the burned, scorched black hole disfiguring the rainbow sheen on her wing. He put the cigar back in his mouth, puffed on it while he examined the ragged scorch mark, then went over to her other side and grasped her right wing.
"No, oh God, please don't, it hurts, please aaahhhHHH!" Amanda screamed out as her other wing was burned through. When she could finally hold her head up again, and she risked a look back, she saw another hole.
Frank grinned. He reached for a cup sitting on a stool just inside the circle of light behind her, and took an ice cube from the cup as the laughter and jeers from the unseen audience increased. He pressed the ice to the area immediately around the burned hole.
Amanda sighed as the cold numbed away the pain from the burn, then began to squirm frantically again as the cold itself started to burn. "Stop it," she sobbed. "Oh, stop, please, take it off, it hurts, please--"
"You want it off?" Frank said. Amanda squirmed frantically, the anguish in her stretched muscles and her shackled wrists forgotten in the greater agony from her now irreparably damaged wings. Her sobs increased as she nodded her head.
Frank took the ice off and applied his cigar directly to the cold-numbed spot. The conflict between heat and cold momentarily overloaded the nerves in her wing, and it was a few seconds before she felt the agony. She screamed and screamed as he did the same thing to her other wing, and didn't even notice when Frank stepped back and was replaced by her ex-fiancé.
"Bruce, please," Amanda sobbed, lifting her tear-streaked face to meet his. "Please let me go. I loved you; I thought you loved me. Why are you hurting me like this?"
Bruce laughed scornfully. "Amanda, whatever made you think I loved you?" he said. "Because I agreed to marry you? Because I let you use my labs for your research? Wrong. I did all that because I wanted to see where you would go with that research.
"I'm a member of the Friends of Humanity. We believe that mutie freaks like you've become, and freaks like your furry boyfriend, should be exterminated. Your kind are just freaks of nature; you shouldn't be allowed to exist. I wanted to keep an eye out on that virus you were working on; I figured some mutie somewhere would give you some sort of bleeding-heart story and try to get you to give up the virus so they could use it in their plans to take over from us humans. And they did, didn't they? Wherever it is you've been hiding, they made you into one of them and then convinced you to give up your virus.
"Now you're going to do the same. Amanda, the one thing I never managed to find out was where in the rainforest you found that virus. You're going to tell me where it was discovered so that I can go and destroy it. Then your mutie friends can't use it. Have you told them where you discovered it?"
"No. And I'm not telling you, either. Bruce, you don't understand. This virus…I never intended it to be used to convert humans; it can't be used like that, because there's no way to tell which humans re human and which ones are carriers like me. I want to rewrite its genetic code so that it will code for the human gene instead of the mutant one so that mutants who have uncontrollable mutations they don't want aren't forced to stay mutants if they don't want to be."
Bruce paused for a second, looking at her uncertainly, then laughed. "That's impossible," he said.
"How would you know? Bruce, you don't have a degree in biogenetics. You have a degree in physics. I read that article in the paper; I know what you told the reporter, and you lied. You don't have a genetics degree, so how would you what is possible and what isn't?"
Bruce slapped her, hard. "Shut up," he snarled. "Your time with those muties warped your mind. They brainwashed you. I bet they screwed you too, didn't they? How about that big blue freak? How's he feel? You have that big thing of his in your filthy body? Huh? You defiled yourself with him?"
Amanda spat at him. She didn't have good aim, and it landed somewhat short of its intended goal (his face) but it made a nice wet patch on his shirt. "And how many women did you 'defile' yourself with while you were engaged to me? I know about Candi. Remember her? The whore you paid two thousand dollars to 'escort' you to Las Vegas for a week? How many other women were there? I stayed faithful to you, Bruce! I loved you! How could you say you loved me and plan our wedding when you were sleeping around with someone else?" She sighed. "You disgust me, Bruce. Get me out of here, now!"
Bruce shook his head. "No, Amanda," he said. "You need to be taught a lesson. I'm going to enjoy hearing your screams." He cupped her chin in his hands and fastened his lips on hers, raping her mouth with a hard, brutal kiss that left her lips bruised. He turned away, rolling up his sleeves as Jason Frank wheeled in a small table with a number of instruments on it. Amanda's eyes widened as he picked up a length of silver bike chain.
When he put that down Amanda was choking on her sobs, and the cacophony of jeers in the darkness beyond the spotlight she hung in was deafening. Under the harsh white light her skin looked unmarked, but there were patches of darkness all over her body that promised to turn into spectacular purple-black bruises later. Bruce hadn't cut her; he'd used the bike chain like a club, pounding into tightly-stretched, aching muscles until Amanda screamed for him to stop.
He walked around her, looking at her and touching the bruises he'd left on her body. He touched the bruise he'd left on her back, in the sensitive spot between her wings, and she cried out. Interested, he stroked her there again, listening to her cry of pain. "So you're especially sensitive there, eh, Amanda?"
He returned to the cart, picked up a length electrical cord with the insulation peeled back to expose the copper wire, and returned to his place behind her. He drew his arm back and then brought the bare wire forward in a quick snapping motion that buried its ends into the thin skin of her back. Amanda jerked in agony, screaming hoarsely, as the first drops of blood welled up on her skin. By the time Bruce put the cord down and wiped the sweat from his forehead, Amanda was almost unconscious.
Jason grinned as he picked up a bucket of hot salt water. "Oh, no," he said to Bruce. "We can't have her passing out before the grand finale, can we?" he dashed the contents of the bucket over the limp hanging body, and both men watched as Amanda regained consciousness screaming in pain as the salt stung the wounds on her back.
Frank wedged a bar of wood between Amanda's teeth, then took the straps and tied it around her head. "You'll thank me for this in a little bit," he said to her, as she made choked sounds from around the dowel in her mouth. He picked up a scalpel and a knife (almost more a machete, really) from the cart, and offered them to Bruce. "Which one?" he said.
Bruce took the scalpel. Frank took the knife, and they turned and walked around to her back. Though Amanda couldn't see it, a large television screen turned on behind her, showing the audience an up-close view of her back. Her wings were splattered with tiny drops of blood. Frank wiped them away with a damp cloth, then went over to a small brazier and lit it. When it was blazing, he shoved the knife into it and watched as the blade heated up.
Bruce looked at the blood-streaked back thoughtfully, ignoring the heaving shoulders. As tightly stretched as Amanda was, he could see the muscles and tendons in her back clearly, and he traced the big tendon that connected her wings to her shoulderblades with his finger thoughtfully before he dug the scalpel delicately into the white skin.
Amanda screamed in agony. Her teeth clamped down hard on the wooden dowel in her mouth, but it did little to assuage the incredible pain in her bag. Bruce worked the scalpel through muscle, flesh, and tendons, cutting out and severing everything connecting her wings to her body. It hurt so much Amanda barely saw the bloody, tattered remnants of her upper right wing hit the floor, followed soon by her upper left wing, and then both her lower wings. She passed out twice, only to be revived by Bruce jabbing the point of the scalpel into the bundle of nerve fibers left exposed as he cut out her wings.
The cheers and shouts of the unseen audience were deafening when the two men finally stood back. Blood flowed freely down Amanda's back, making a huge puddle under the floor, and she could no longer scream; it simply hurt too much. She thought she couldn't hurt anymore than she was; but she was wrong.
"We don't want her to die from blood loss," Frank commented finally as Bruce poked the exposed nerve fibers with his scalpel. He took the long-knife out of the brazier carefully and brought it over. Bruce took it from him and pressed the white-hot blade against the gaping holes in Amanda's back.
She went wild. There was an audible pop as her right arm, yanking wildly against the unyielding chain, popped out of its socket. Frank grinned, shoved the knife back into the brazier for a few seconds, and then pressed it against the other hole in her back. The heavy metallic scent of hot blood and burning flesh filled the air, and Bruce waved a hand under his nose as he surveyed the limp body in front of him. Amanda had passed out, and there was no waking her this time.
* * *
Hank jerked awake on his cot in the jail cell. He had fallen into a light doze, and had the most terrible nightmare…
As he rubbed his hands over his face, he reviewed the dream in his mind. Bruce couldn't be that cruel. Could he? Hank tried to tell himself it was a dream; but the sick feeling in his stomach wouldn't go away, and it was accompanied by an impression of impending doom. Away in the back of his mind, he knew that Amanda was in trouble.
He sprang to his feet as a guard came to his cell door, followed by Xavier and Jean. "Your bail's been posted," the guard said gruffly. "You can go."
Hank ignored him, turning to Xavier. "Where is she," he asked Charles urgently. "Where's Amanda? She's in trouble; I know she's in trouble. I just saw her...in a dream…Bruce was there…he cut out her wings…"
"Hank, where? Do you know where? She's been missing since yesterday; we think she went out to confront Bruce. Jubilee and Logan went to his apartment, but he wasn't there. We're trying to find her. Charles tried using Cerebro, but he couldn't find her. She might be somewhere shielded. Do you know where she might be?"
"In my vision, Bruce was being assisted by the head of the Friends of Humanity. We will most likely find her there." Hank increased his pace.
Xavier's eyes went briefly unfocused, and Hank 'heard' the telepathic all in his hed. X-Men! Meet us at the Friends of Humanity's headquarters! Hank believes Amanda is there!
It wasn't belief. Hank knew she would be there, and he knew what they would find. He could only hope they weren't too late.