The sun dipped low on the horizon. Adam looked up at it, judging the time, and then over at the mutant mountain cat that had been assigned to guard them. The furry half-man half-beast lifted a corner of his mouth in an eerie and silent snarl of warning: don't try it.
As if I had any intention of doing so. Brennan could probably take down half a dozen of these ferals before they overwhelmed him through sheer numbers, and Adam himself could account for another two, maybe three. But not all of them. It would be suicide, and Bartholomew had already made it quite clear that Adam and Brennan were only still breathing because they needed a lever for Jesse's cooperation.
Which was another joke. Cooperation was not difficult when the man doing the cooperating was sleeping. Jesse had woken up twice during the day, asked for something to drink, and promptly fallen back asleep. Which was probably the best thing for him after last night's research project for turning badly mutated humans back into something that could pass for homo sapien, but didn't make Adam feel any better. Not for the first time he wished that they were all safely back in Sanctuary where he could draw blood samples and care for the team that he had grown so close to. Dangerous ground there, Dr. Kane. How will they feel when the day comes that you have to leave them behind? Brennan has guessed that you have hidden secrets, and probably Emma, but how will you cope with the shock on the face of the young man sleeping on the cave floor in front of you? How badly will the knife stab your heart when Shalimar looks at you with disappointment written plain?
Not useful now. At the moment, the goal was to escape with both mutants intact. Brennan was safe from the poisonous potion as long as the mutants didn't think that he was one of them. Brennan would be Adam's ace in the hole. With a broken wing, the man wouldn't be as lethal as usual but could still make a good accounting for himself and surprise would enhance that opportunity. Brennan himself had automatically seen that—score one for the street-wise kid—and had refrained from using his powers since the first night. At the moment the man had seated himself on the ground next to Jesse, leaning his back against the cave wall, eyes going hooded and smoldering with anger. Just give the word, and I'll blast as many of these bastards as I can. Just give the word.
All right, so they had fire power to rely upon. Not enough. The beast mutants had enough speed to overwhelm that advantage. Needed more. What? C'mon, Dr. Kane, stretch those brain muscles for something other than some basic chemistry.
Think logically. Escape. In order to escape, they needed to put distance between them and the beast mutants. And it needed to be a lot of territory, so that the speedy ferals couldn't catch up with Mutant X trying to limp back to civilization.
No, wait a minute. Bad assumption. It didn't need to be a lot of distance, it just needed to be some place that the beast mutants couldn't get to. Then the trio could either duke it out from safety or wait for Shalimar and Emma to find them. Two additional mutants would even things up quickly. And it was no assumption to think that the rest of his team would be searching for them; it was a fact.
Okay, distance was out. Adam, Brennan, and Jesse could never outpace the beast mutants even on a good day. Maybe Brennan alone, if he weren't injured, but the other two: never. Where else? Up high? That had been done. Been there, done that, crashed the Helix out of the sky, Dr. Kane. Think of something else. And fast, because nightfall was approaching with another mutant cocktail for Jesse to drink, one that he might not survive this time. Think!
Adam's gaze lit on the bruised knuckles of his fist, the blood that formed a scab after futilely punching out the back of the cave. Adam Kane despised senseless displays of violence, and the fact that he himself had given in made it worse. Yet there was something that had caught his attention, some little detail that was niggling at his brain…
Hollow. That was it. When he struck the back of the cave, it had echoed hollowly. And the back ofa cave wouldn't be hollow unless there was an opening behind the unbroken wall. An unbroken wall that no one could get through. No one, that is, except a molecular mutant able to alter the density of a wall at will…
And that was assuming that the cavity behind the back of the cave was large enough to hold three people. Adam dampened the first flush of hope. Even just two would be enough; Adam was willing to sacrifice himself so that the others would live. It would only be fitting. This mission had begun because Adam had wanted to get that psionic mutant to the Underground commune where he could live in peace and safety. The three of them were here because of Adam.
He rose. "Keep an eye on Jesse," he instructed Brennan.
Brennan lifted one eyebrow. You've got an idea?
"Maybe." Adam began to tap lightly against the back of the cave wall, rapping where he had struck the wall as his starting point. He moved upward, listening to the sound waves, using the echoes like a human sonar. "Tall enough," he murmured, "and down to the ground. Maybe a little bit further. Moving right. Three feet, good for two people squeezed; yes, another three feet to the left. We can all fit," he told Brennan, "assuming that it's deep enough. I have no way of assessing how far back this pocket goes."
"Or if there's another way out," Brennan suggested, catching on immediately. "There might be a back door."
"Hm. True." Adam hadn't even thought that far ahead. Score another one for the street. Always look for a way out.
"Let me listen." Brennan hauled himself to his feet to tap on the wall himself. "Sound is very deep. It's probably a good-sized pocket in there." He glanced back at Jesse, still out cold on the floor of the cave. "You're thinking maybe Jesse—?"
"Got a better idea?" Adam tried to keep his tone light.
"I could blast our way out." Trying to protect the one the elemental perceived as being the weaker member of the team, to relieve him of the responsibility for their escape. Another wrong assumption, Adam wanted to tell him. We all make them. Me most of all. Yours is that you consider Jesse weak. Me, I know better.
"Then what?" Adam responded, tilting his head. "We walk out of here? Which way to the nearest all night diner, Brennan? And what happens when Bartholomew and the rest catch up with us?" He indicated Jesse. "They're going to keep coming after him until he's dead. These are desperate people, Brennan, and desperate people do desperate things."
"Got that right." Brennan slapped the cave wall for emphasis. "Witness what you're suggesting. I don't relish being caught inside a stone tomb with no way out."
"Worst case scenario, it's a respite from these mutants and a chance for Shalimar and Emma to find us," Adam said. "Best case, there's a way out far from here, and we escape to the local five star hotel where we wait, basking in a hot tub, for Shalimar and Emma to pick us up."
"I can live with that. Let's see if we can wake up the man with the key to this door."
But at that moment the opening to the cave darkened. Bodies filled the entrance, bodies with unwashed shaggy fur. The musky odor was stifling. Bartholomew pushed to the front of the pack, looking at the two in the back of the cave warily. It was from them that any danger lurked. Adam and Brennan were the two on their feet, the pair that was able and willing to fight back. "It's time. Wake him up."
"No!" Brennan came to alert. "No, you can't take him! Haven't you done enough to him?"
"No," said Bartholomew, "we haven't."
"He hasn't done enough for us yet," Wilbur added, a cup of the steaming green potion in his paw. Even without feral senses Brennan could have gagged on the stench. In fact he had, two nights ago. Had it really been that long that this nightmare had been going on? Yo, Shal, Emma. A little help over here?
Gotta find us first.
"Bring him," Bartholomew directed.
Two of the beast mutants started to pick the molecular up off the floor, but Adam stopped them. "No," he said. "We'll get him." He lifted his chin challengingly. "This may be the last time we see him alive." As in: don't try to stop us.
Bartholomew too knew when to pick his battles. He graciously accepted the free labor.
Adam slid his arms under Jesse's back, lifting him up bodily, Brennan going for the other side.
"Adam?" Jesse asked sleepily, clearly not wanting to wake up.
"It's all right, Jesse." Adam shook his head warningly at Brennan, an imperceptible little movement. No. Not yet.
Yes.
No. We have to let this one play out.
Yes! He's going to die if we don't.
No! He might not die. We can't risk it. We'll lose everything.
Yes! Brennan suddenly slipped his broken arm out of the sling and dumped Jesse's limp weight onto Adam. He flashed lightning from his fingertips, taking out two beast mutants in one swift strike. Another went down with a booted heel in his gut, Brennan heedless of the pain that the broken bone was inflicting on himself with every move he made.
No help for it now; the cat was out of the bag. Jesse wavered to a standing position, recognized the danger they were in, and used all the adrenaline at his disposal to create a pile-driver out of his arm and smash it into a nearby nose. The mountain lion mutant yelped and went down. But the cat wasn't done yet. He bounced back to his feet and slipped inside Jesse's guard with the speed of—well, the speed of a mountain lion.
Adam too joined into the fray. One long leg connected with a back kick that rang someone's chimes, and he followed it up with a blow that had an odd feel to it: hitting a bear's snout was different from giving a man a shiner.
The results were different, too. A man would have gone down under the onslaught. Wilbur, with his grizzly bear mutation, simply shook it off. The almost negligent return slap from that grizzly paw slammed Adam into the hard cave wall. Adam slid down the cold surface, stunned.
Bartholomew jumped forward, grabbed Adam by the throat, hawk talons ready to dig into his jugular. "Hold!" he hissed.
Brennan halted. One of the beast mutants, one with a badger's silver stripe through his hair, sucker-punched him in the arm: the broken one. Brennan went down gasping, clutching the fractured bones, and the only fight he was then capable of was the one to continue breathing during the remainder of the pain.
Wilbur ambled bear fashion over to Brennan, ignoring the agony the man was in. He nudged him with a bear claw. "Guess he is a mutant," he rumbled. "'lectrical type. Wonder why the potion didn't work on him? Made it the same way."
"You'll have plenty of time to try it on him again." Bartholomew was ready to rub his hands in glee, only one hand was still occupied in threatening Adam with talons. "We know it works on the molecular. Bring him out. It's time."
"No!" Adam burst out. "You'll kill him! Don't do this!"
Wilbur lost interest in Brennan for the moment. He looked sideways at Adam, calculating. "Y'know, Bartholomew, the guy's a doctor."
"And—?"
Wilbur indicated the potion that he carefully set down outside of the fray. "That stuff that I make is pretty potent, and this kid is gonna get weaker and weaker each time we use it. Let's have this guy watch. He wants to have this mutant live as long as possible as much as we do. Maybe he'll have some good ideas."
"Maybe he'll come up with a way to escape," Bartholomew pointed out. His talons tightened on Adam's throat. Adam tried not to move.
"Not if we keep someone here with Mr. Lightning Rod," Wilbur rumbled. "All you gotta do is rap him one on the wing if he gets too mouthy. Gotta keep him around too, 'cause this one ain't gonna last for all of us." He jerked a hairy thumb at Jesse.
Bartholomew agreed to the plan. "Darryl, you stay here. You lost the lottery to go next; you'll have a lot of incentive to keep another mutant alive and kicking so that you'll get a chance at the potion like the rest of us. Don't let him escape."
"Believe me, I won't." The expression didn't looked forced on the wolverine's nose but it did look ferocious. Brennan glared back.
"Now you. Both of you." Bartholomew turned to Adam and Jesse. "On your feet. One wrong move, and I'll show you just what a feral mutation can do."
Wait until Shalimar gets here. You'll learn things about ferals you never knew existed. Especially the pissed off female kind. Ever hear the one about the female being more deadly than the male? But Adam kept his thoughts to himself, slipping a supportive shoulder under Jesse's arm and guiding him out into the open mountain night.
The campfire sent flickering shadows among the rocks. The beast mutants gathered around, eager to see one of their own transformed back into human, on the outside if not on the inside. There were high cliff walls around the encampment, preventing the fire from being easily seen. These people were truly a different form of feral, Adam realized. Shalimar would never have welcomed a fire in any fashion if she didn't have to. Even when camping, the feral only allowed it for the others. What other differences had Van Duyn's process produced, he wondered. The fur, the appearance, the fear of fire? Was it affecting their minds?
Jesse stumbled; two mutants grabbed him by the arms, keeping him upright and immobilizing him. They pushed him toward the center of the group, closer to the campfire where the weasel man was waiting impatiently.
"Give it to him," the weasel mutant said eagerly.
Jesse had no choice. There were more than enough beast mutants to hold him fast and force the steaming potion down his throat. He gagged; they refused to relent, pouring the entire contents of the cup into his mouth and securing him until he swallowed. Adam watched in horror as Jesse sagged limply into the grasp of the beast mutants.
"Me! Give him to me," the weasel beast mutant demanded. "It's my turn to be fixed!" He clutched Jesse to his chest in a horrific parody of a hug, squeezing until Adam was certain that the molecular wouldn't be able to breathe. Jesse shuddered, the potion coursing through his veins. He tossed his head back with a sharp cry.
Then it happened. If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Adam would have denied that it was even possible. Even now, witnessing it, Adam still couldn't believe it. The change occurred.
The weasel beast mutant was large, large enough to completely envelope the molecular in his grasp. They almost seemed to melt together, so closely did the beast hold the human. Their edges wavered; Jesse gasped in sudden agony as the two exchanged.. what? It had to be some form of DNA, that Adam knew, but how?
No matter; it worked. The shaggy dark pelt slipped away to reveal flawless tan skin, the only hair remaining of the top of the man's head. The transformation revealed a man not much taller than Jesse himself with red hair and, like Clarence before him, a five o'clock shadow working toward ten PM. He raised clear eyes to scan his unfortunate fellows, a sense of wonder suffusing his suddenly pale features. "It worked!" he breathed in awe. "I'm me!" He felt his suddenly hairless skin all over. "I'm me!"
He released the molecular, Jesse staggering back until caught by Adam's strong and waiting arms. Adam carefully lowered the man to the ground, his eyes rolling back into his head. "Jesse?"
Jesse didn't respond. Small movements in his arms and legs began, little rhythmic jerkings that coalesced into larger ones. Fear clutched at Adam's heart.
Bartholomew stood over them. "What's wrong with him? It's over. Tell him to go to sleep, like the other times."
"What's wrong with him?" Adam kept his attention on his patient. "He's seizing. He's about to go into a grand mal seizure, that's what's wrong with him! You poisoned him; that's what's wrong with him!" Dammit, what I wouldn't give for a syringe filled with benzodiazepine in my back pocket! "Help me turn him over so that he doesn't aspirate."
Too late. The small jerky movements turned into one large and massive contraction, contorting the molecular into a parody of human. Breathing stopped.
"Jesse!" Adam's own heart stopped. "Dammit!" He tried to tilt the head back, ready to breathe for the man, but the muscles wouldn't respond. The molecular was as stiff as though he had phased rock solid. "Jesse!"
Then, for the second time in less than thirty minutes, the amazing happened. A slender mist emanated from the molecular, barely visible in the erratic light of the campfire, and molded itself into the outline of a young woman. A woman with red hair that framed her face with wispy bangs, with eyes of an old soul that looked straight through each and every person there.
It took every ounce of self-control that Adam possessed not to blurt out, "Emma?" For it was so clearly the psionic member of Mutant X that for a moment Adam feared that one of the beast mutants would read the truth on his face and strike the terrified blow that would end the apparition—and Jesse's life.
Not a word was said out loud. The beast mutants stared at the ghostly figure, some trembling in fear and ready to bolt, others with the fur standing up on the back of their neck in an unconscious animalistic threat display against this intruder into their camp. But there was nothing to strike at, only mist. The girlish head slowly, almost lazily, rotated in a circle, taking in every detail of the camp, every rock and every tree, memorizing the location. The eyes paused on Adam, and the scientist would later swear that he felt a delicate tickling in his mind.
But it was all imagined—wasn't it? Ghosts aren't real, don't appear in anything other than fiction and blatant attempts to separate fools from their money. That's what the beast mutants will think.
This was Emma.
The mist faded away along with the seizure. Jesse took a deep, sighing breath and turned over in Adam's arms.
It was the signal for the beast mutants to panic. Several dashed away from the campfire into the night, others throwing dirt over the blaze to douse it in terror. Shouts rang out mixed with animal bleating. Wilbur himself gave a bear howl that told of his distress at not understanding what had happened. Clearly this was not something that any of the beast mutants had anticipated.
"What did you do?" Bartholomew demanded of Adam. "What happened?"
"What do you mean?" Got to stay innocent, here. "This is your potion, Bartholomew. I had nothing to do with it." Adam indicated the molecular in his arms. "I'm here as an interested observer, and as a doctor. And right now, this man is dying. Hear that, Bartholomew? No more mutant to use in your experiments. If I don't get him stabilized, he'll die."
That got through to the hawk mutant. "We have the other one."
"Who didn't work with your first try," Adam reminded him. "What if he can't help you at all?" Which is what will happen if I have anything to say about it. "He's an elemental, not a feral. You might not be compatible."
"Got that right," came mumbled from the direction of a beast mutant of the badger persuasion who'd been zapped earlier in the fight. A streak of burned fur lay across his shoulder.
"Fix him," Bartholomew demanded, his terror already receding in the face of more immediate pressures. "Keep him from dying, or you'll be next."
"You don't need threats to get me to work on him," Adam returned calmly, keeping his temper under wraps. "He means a lot more to me than he does to you. Help me get him back to shelter. The night is cold. It'll be a toss up which kills him first: your poison or pneumonia."
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Emma woke Shalimar up excitedly. "Shalimar! I saw them! I saw Adam and Jesse!"
"And Brennan?" Shalimar dashed the sleep from her eyes. The sun was ready to come up; it was time to rise no matter what.
"No, I didn't 'see' him but I could tell he was nearby. Adam knew where he was."
Shalimar was all business. "Tell me what you saw. I'll compare it with our topo maps."
Emma nodded. "They're not inside the cave any longer but they are in some sort of enclosed cliff area; a campsite. I got a good look around the immediate area. They're high up on one of the mountains. All I saw were pine trees, nothing that grows lower down. And the pine trees were fairly stunted, as though they were close to the snow line."
Shalimar pursed her lips. "That helps. That cuts off the lowlands, and it gives us a narrow band to search on each mountain. Good going, Emma. You've eliminated at least two-thirds of the area to search. What else?"
Now Emma's face fell. "I saw lots of things, but I'm not certain that it will help us. Tall cliffs, a big bonfire. Maybe we could see the fire from the air."
"Maybe," Shalimar mused. "Two problems: one, we're short one Helix, and forgot to bring along the spare. We can't get up into the air. Wait, I forgot; we don't have a spare." She smacked her forehead in mock exasperation.
"And problem number two?"
Shalimar grew serious. "There is a very efficient and motivated Park Ranger Service in these parts. The threat of a forest fire is one the Rangers take very seriously. The people who have our guys must have a way to hide any fire so that it can't be easily seen, otherwise the Park Service would be all over them. Looking for a fire in the night is not going to help us."
Emma had to agree. "I'm sorry, Shal. I can't be any more specific than I have been. I mean, I'll know the place when I see it again, but I don't know where it is in relation to where we are right now."
"Not to worry." Shalimar gave her team mate a jubilant hug. "We'll find them. And you just single-handedly cut down the amount of territory to cover. I'd say that was a big accomplishment, girl!"