Red America: Western Front
Chapter Twelve: Feeding Frenzy
Kitty walked a few metres away from her squad, watching as Commissar Braddock strode towards her, her gloved fists clenched and her face set into a triumphant smile. The hammer-and-sickle insignia on the woman's peaked cap glittered as traces of dulled, septic light fell across it, and her greatcoat billowed slightly in the breeze blowing through the tunnel. She watched Commissar Braddock's gaze moving from one member of her squad to the next, knowing that they were being marked as useful either as mind-wiped soldiers or as half-starved hard labour, and made sure to keep her mind full of defiant thoughts. From her past experiences with this woman, she knew that she had to keep up resistance on two fronts, and she had to wonder how long she would be able to maintain that effort before she and the rest of her soldiers were overwhelmed. Commissar Braddock came to a halt so close to Kitty that they would have been almost nose to nose, had Kitty not been at least a head shorter than her, with that same sadistic, victorious smile still draped across her face. She looked down at Kitty as if she was almost impressed with what Kitty had achieved, and reached up with her right hand to touch Kitty's chin, turning Kitty's face ever-so-slightly to the left. "You know you have no chance against me, don't you?" she whispered directly into Kitty's ear.
"More than you think," Kitty spat back defiantly. She drew one of her knives from its sheath on her belt and plunged it into the Commissar's belly – only to find that she was stabbing thin air. She shook her head, realising that she had been talking to an illusion as she saw the Commissar, the real Commissar, standing next to Clint and the blue-furred demon-man, with her arms folded and a disappointed look on her face. She shook her head.
"Wrong answer, Katherine," she said thinly, and then she simply raised her right hand above her head and clenched it tightly closed. Beside her, the bestial soldiers howled with delight and charged, their weapons hanging uselessly at their waists as they hurled themselves forwards. Kitty fended one off with the butt of her rifle, smashing him in the jaw with the heavy wooden stock and sending him sprawling into the filth on the floor of the sewer. He skidded a little, kicking up a small wave of dirty water, and then he sprang back to his feet, a delighted look in his eyes as the bruise on his face shifted through several colours as it healed. He wasted no time then, exploiting Kitty's shock with a slashing blow of his open hand towards her thigh, his fingers curved like talons. Kitty couldn't tell what he was trying to achieve, but she phased anyway, letting him pass straight through her and out the other side. Once he was clear, she went solid again and kicked him in the back of the head, knocking him to the ground again. She watched him splashing into the dirty soup on the ground and heard him cursing in broken, ragged Russian – and then he whipped his head around to look at her, and Kitty's eyes widened in shock as she saw that his eyes were now a brilliant green, and glowing with anger. She heard the vague sound of his uniform tearing as his body began to grow, his muscles bulging and ripping through his jacket as he growled in rage. Stunned, Kitty tried to fire a burst from her rifle but the man was inside her field of fire before she could pull the trigger, grabbing the weapon and crushing it in his hand, ripping it away from her and throwing the ruined, twisted remains across the tunnel. As he moved, Kitty could see his new form turning livid green, with similarly-coloured hair sprouting down the length of his spine and along his arms. At the same time, large, curved fangs were pushing their way out of his mouth, their tips extending about halfway down his chin, and his fingers were splitting so that long greenish-black claws could emerge from their tips. He howled loud and long, and was poised to spring at her when one of Madrox's dupes hit him in the chest with a burst of fire on full-auto. The beast-man staggered back a pace, but the bullets did little else except bounce off his skin, crumpling almost penny-flat and scattering on the ground.
"Holy shit," Kitty breathed, reflexively ducking a swipe from the creature's right hand and trying to aim one of her knives at its face. In its desire to strike, it had left itself defenceless, and Kitty seized the opportunity, diving forwards and throwing the blade into the creature's face, right at its left eye. It hit the monster's eyeball dead centre... and snapped. Kitty barely had time to register the shock of seeing the ruined stump of her knife bouncing off the beast-man's face before it grasped a chunk of loose paving and hurled it at her. It passed straight through her phased form and hit another of the Russian soldiers in the back of the head, knocking him to the floor and giving Tabitha and Jubilation a momentary lifeline. Kitty could see that Tabitha, at least, was covered with bites and scratches up and down the length of her arms. They weren't serious, but they were deep enough to make her bleed, and Kitty didn't like the way that she was starting to wobble on her feet."Fall back! Get out of here!" she yelled. "Move!"
Madrox drew up beside her, his weapon still spraying bullets uselessly towards the horde of Russian beast-soldiers, and threw her a worried look. Kitty could see now that every single one of the Russian troops had changed in the same way as the one which had attacked her, snarling and drooling as they loped towards their prey, their clawed hands flexing open and closed. She realised that there wasn't time for her to ponder what was going on – her first priority was getting her squad away from these monsters without any of them getting hurt any more than they had been already. Looking around she did a quick head-count and saw that every one of her squad that had still been alive when they'd first encountered the beast-creatures had remained that way, although they all looked much the worse for wear. Cecilia naturally didn't have any open wounds, but she looked tired and drawn, and Kitty guessed that her force-field had been sorely tested by one of those monsters. Hank, meanwhile, had just as many bites and scratches as Tabitha, along with a ragged, nasty-looking cut that ran down the length of his forearm, which he was attempting to hurriedly bind with his teeth and his good hand, using a scrap of cloth he'd torn from his sleeve. Jubilee, she saw, was relatively unscathed, and she was gratified to see the girl occasionally stopping to fire the pistol she'd given her at the monsters pursuing them. She wasn't hitting much at all, but Kitty knew that she'd been exactly the same the first time she'd fired up a gun – she remembered the recoil of her father's .38 pistol almost breaking her eight year-old wrist – so she wasn't going to condemn her for that. Right now, she was proud of the girl for ending her reluctance to participate in this mission, since she needed every last pair of hands to help her now. Not for the first time, she made a mental note to ask Logan for a mind-reader next time she went on one of these trips. The amount of trouble the Ivans had caused her with their mind-witches should have been enough to clue her into the fact that they were all-too-necessary these days. Worry about that later, she cursed. Focus on not fucking dying first. "Jamie!" she yelled over the sound of the gunfire around her. "We need to get above ground. Maybe we can scatter these things and then regroup later!"
"Sounds like a plan to me," Madrox said, glancing angrily at his rifle as it cycled dry. Letting it fall by his hip, he pulled out two pistols from holsters at his waist and began firing them as he ran. "I really don't want to end up as green-doggy chow. Where's a flame-thrower when you need one?"
"You saw those things," Kitty snapped, her footsteps splashing as she passed through a puddle of muck. "I shot one in the fucking eye and it still kept coming. You think a little bit of fire is going to stop them?"
"Probably not, but who said I wanted to use it on them?" Madrox said, nodding to his left. "If we could make a napalm barrier between them and us it'd buy us a little time."
"I'd prefer plastic explosive," Kitty replied. "Pity we didn't bring enough this time." She ground her palms into the trigger grips of her guns and gritted her teeth. "Fucking Stark!" she hissed. "If it wasn't for his worthless traitor ass we wouldn't be in this situation!"
"We should have killed him the moment we saw him," Tabitha suggested helpfully over the approaching sound of howls. "All we were supposed to do was keep him out of the Russkies' hands, right? Can't get much more successful than that."
"Shut the hell up, Tabitha," Cecilia grunted, her force-field clearly still causing her pain. "You want to help, shoot something..."
Kitty was about to tell the two women to stop arguing when she noticed a sliver of light coming from the roof of the tunnel. It was a manhole cover, and it looked like the seals were open. She felt a shiver of relief run up her spine and pointed upwards. "Head upstairs, guys. I'm thinking those things won't be able to track us as well when we're in the open." She reached the ladder that led to ground level and ushered the rest of the squad up through the open cover. "Come on, guys. Let's get outta here."
When the rest of the squad had made their way up through the hatch, Kitty grabbed the lower rung of the ladder and then hauled herself up through the hole. She tried for a moment or two to get her breathing down to a manageable level, when a familiar voice caused her blood to run cold.
"Put your hands up, Miss Pryde, or you'll lose them." She looked up and saw the familiar shape of the Iron Man suit looming in front of her. It looked sleeker and more uniform than it had done the last time she'd seen it, with knots of fresh steel piping and plating bolted onto numerous places on the suit's hide – and there was a large hammer-and-sickle emblem painted on the right side of the cockpit. When Tony Stark noticed her shock and horror, he grinned savagely. "What can I say? I realised I was backing the wrong side. I spent years building this thing, and you wanted me to just... throw it away? Where the hell do you idiots get off telling me what I can and can't do with my own damn property?" A dangerous light was beginning to shine in his eyes now, and Kitty half-expected the gun-barrels on the suit's weapon-arm to start spraying out bullets at any second.
"What?" Jubilation said, her eyes confused and unfocused. "What?" She looked abruptly shell-shocked, as if the sight of her former companion dressed in the colours of the Soviets was too much for her to bear. "Why?"
"I'm... sorry, Jubilation," Stark replied, a small fraction of compassion needling its way into his voice. "I told the Russians that I didn't want them to hurt you, if that makes it any better. They'll be kind to you, I promise –"
"Don't try and get out of this, you bastard!" Jubilation shrieked suddenly. "This heap of junk matters more to you than me? Fuck you!" She raised her pistol in both hands and screamed wordlessly as she fired three shots right at the cockpit of the Iron Man suit, the bullets barely grazing the protected glass in front of Stark's face. "Fuck you!" she yelled again, tears running freely down her cheeks. "I –"
Snarling and howling coming from the manhole cover stopped her in her tracks, and she swung around to see one of the green-furred animal-men hauling itself up onto ground level, its hide damp and tiger-striped with sewer muck. It ignored the sudden hail of bullets that bounced off its skull, and focused its baleful green glare on Kitty as more of its pack appeared from underground. Growling, it charged her with both of its clawed hands open and ready to strike. It covered the distance between Kitty and itself in a fraction of the time that Kitty had expected, but she was still phased when it raked her with its talons, the sharp edges passing harmlessly through her ghost-form and punching deep hollows into the ground. For a moment, Kitty thought it would pull up half the sidewalk with its paw as it struggled to free itself – and that was when she saw a chance to even up the score a little. Grabbing one of the two grenades on her bandolier, she hefted it in her right hand, pulled the pin and ran towards the monster as it growled and snapped at the rebels around it. When she had closed with the beast, she aimed the hand which held the grenade into the centre of its abdomen, and let go of the grenade's spoon as she passed through the monster's back. "Fire in the hole!" she yelled, bracing herself for an explosive splatter of flesh and bone... but it never came. She heard the muffled thud of the explosion, but all she saw when she turned back to look at her target was a slightly unsteady-looking monster with a vaguely disorientated expression on its face. It looked ready to fall over, but it wasn't dead by any stretch of the imagination.
Jesus Christ, she thought in despair, what does it take to kill one of these fucking things?
The creature she'd tried to obliterate quickly shook off its confusion and then refocused its attention on her, drool spilling out of the left side of its mouth. It was about to leap at her when one of its squad-mates slammed into it from behind, sending it thudding to the ground as the newcomer howled with bloodlust of its own. It sprang to its feet then, enraged, and leapt straight at the newcomer, having apparently forgotten all about its former prey. Kitty gaped as the two former comrades-in-arms thrashed and howled at each other, their wickedly-curved claws gouging long, deep furrows in each other's hides. Kitty felt a rush of relief flood through her body and was about to yell out to her squad what to do in order to thin out the pack of beast-men when she heard Tabitha crying out wetly, her agonised voice almost turning to a gurgle. Kitty swung around to see the girl clutching her stomach where one of the monsters had opened it up from one side of her belly to the other – and then watched helplessly as the beast shoved its arm elbow-deep into Tabitha's body, tearing out a handful of her intestines and beginning to stuff the glistening red meat into its mouth as she collapsed into a tangled, boneless heap, a deep crimson halo beginning to form around her. When it had finished slurping down its handful of meat, it turned its bloodied muzzle in Madrox's direction and growled deep in its throat, its gore-stained teeth bared and the leg of Tabitha's corpse still clutched in its left paw. Predictably, one of the other creatures pounced on the free meat, causing the creature that had made the kill to cuff it across the face with a fistful of claws. Just as before, the two beasts started fighting each other, their foes forgotten in the blink of an eye.
"Jamie!" Kitty cried, throwing her pointed finger towards the advancing soldiers. "Make some more dupes – maybe we can bait these things into killing each other!" Madrox gave her a disbelieving look, but quickly pounded his heel into the ground four or five times, creating a screen of multiple Madroxes around him.
"This is going to hurt me a lot more than it'll hurt you, you know," he said sarcastically, before his dupes began to shout and wave their arms energetically at the remaining beast-soldiers in order to attract their attention. The creatures swung their heads around quickly, licking their lips as they saw Madrox's dupes simply walking towards them with their hands open and extended in a gesture of surrender, while Madrox himself moved back towards where Kitty was standing as quickly as possible (if history had taught them anything, it was that any mass-sacrifice of Madrox's dupes would cost him dearly, at least in the short-term). It didn't take long for the beast-men to take advantage of the dupes' compliant state, gutting them with fangs and claws and making the original Madrox fall to the ground clutching his stomach and screaming in pain. When she was sure they were occupied, Kitty turned her eyes to Cecilia, who was looking even more ragged and drained, although she was still without a scratch. Hank, meanwhile, was cradling another impressive bite-mark on his injured arm, the bulky muscle there punctured almost to the bone once more by sharp, elongated canine teeth. Kitty pursed her lips, realising that he wasn't going to be much use if those wounds were not treated properly sooner rather than later, and was about to call out to them when she heard the sound of the Iron Man suit's gun-arm finally beginning to spin up, the gears of the weapon screeching as they started loading its fat, explosive-tipped ammunition. Evidently Stark had had orders not to risk hitting any of the beast-soldiers, but now that they were more concerned with slaughtering Madrox's dupes, or with fighting amongst themselves over the leftovers, he had finally been given the go-ahead to open fire. Kitty spun around, grabbed Madrox by the arm and dragged him to his feet despite his mewling protests.
"Come on, stud, let's get out of here," she whispered to him, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice. "If you can do this for me, I promise I'll have sex with you every night for a month."
Madrox looked at her with bloodshot, watery eyes, and coughed a trickle of pink saliva. "You owe me more than that, Kit," he said hoarsely. "You're not the one getting eaten out there."
"It's okay, Jamie," Kitty said, grasping him a little more tightly as she began to phase. "We'll get out of here, I promise."
She felt a cold weight suddenly appear in her free hand then. Looking down, she saw that Madrox had pressed a grenade into it. "You had the right idea earlier," he said, spraying his chin with blood as he spoke. "Stark isn't invulnerable."
"What –" Kitty began, before the realisation of what Madrox was suggesting sank in. Helping him to a standing position, she let him lean painfully against a nearby wall, the blood from his mouth dropping onto his fatigues in steady trickles of red, and then started to sprint towards the Iron Man suit as it stomped forwards through the bickering mass of the green-furred beast-men. Stark spotted her coming, and immediately swung his gun-arm towards her, stitching a long line of pockmarks into the road ahead of him. The bullets passed harmlessly through her phased form, and she took a running leap towards the cockpit of the suit when she was close enough, pulling the pin on the grenade as she did so. Ghost-walking her way through the bulletproof cover, she found herself face to face with a suddenly-terrified Stark. "Hi, Tony," she said, waving the grenade at him before she opened her hand and dropped it on the floor next to his feet. Quickly retreating back to where she had left Madrox, she watched him scrabbling desperately for the grenade, or perhaps an escape hatch, before the resulting detonation painted the inside of the cockpit glass a messy shade of crimson and sprayed deadly shrapnel in all directions. "Bye, Tony," she spat, her voice thick with contempt. The explosion grabbed the attention of the remaining creatures, their fur thick with the green blood of their former comrades, and they began to swarm towards the wrecked mechanical behemoth, attracted by the sickly, raw-meat scent of Stark's pulverised remains. Madrox managed half a smile then, as Kitty slung one of his arms over her shoulder.
"See?" he said, coughing wetly. "You should listen to me more often."
"If she did that, Jamie, she'd probably have ended up dead a dozen times before now," Hank said flatly. "Now, I suggest we get out of here before the Ivans send in any reinforcements..."
David North felt so vulnerable now that he thought he might as well have been naked. He had just opened a maintenance panel in a corner of the floor of Commissar Braddock's private gymnasium, and Wade was packing three individual bundles of plastic explosive into it, setting the trigger mechanisms almost lovingly as he did so. They were timed to go off at eight the following morning, when the Commissar would almost certainly be in the middle of her morning workout. He was still very concerned about the outcome of this mission – since General Doom had been dead for a while now, who was going to fill the void left by the Commissar's death? Clearly, it would be a gamble as to who was drafted in to replace her – David wondered whether they would be replacing one problem with an even bigger one, but for all this plan's insane faults, he had to admit he'd trusted General Doom's intentions. The man might have been a power-hungry warmonger, but he'd known how to play a political game – and when to use brute force to win an argument. The Commissar was a worthy officer, that was certain, but she was playing a dangerous game using Doctor Pym's crazed theories to engineer super-soldiers for the Red Army. If High Command couldn't see that, then perhaps it was for the best that she be forcibly removed. General Doom would be proven right in death, if not in life.
David raised his eyebrows for a moment or two. That was likely not to be any comfort to the general, he decided.
"What's that, buddy?" Wade piped up cheerfully. "You say something?"
"No," David replied. "Why?"
"Oh, just felt like making conversation," Wade said, shrugging. "You know how it is – sabotage is much more fun when you can talk about the football. You see the game Saturday night?"
"No," David hissed again. "Look, shut the fuck up for once, will you? Someone might hear you..."
"Not scared, are you, Dave?" Wade asked, turning back to look at him for the first time since they'd entered the room. "Look, nobody knows we're here. I saw to that myself. Anybody who might come near here's been reassigned until later in the evening." He tapped his temple, chuckling quietly. "I'm not just a pretty face, you know – sometimes it pays to know your way around a computer."
"Are you finished?" David said impatiently. "Are those things set?"
"Set like concrete," Wade said. "They'll go off at eight tomorrow morning, unless I detonate them before then." He held up a small wireless detonator unit. "This thing can make them blow from a mile away. Either way, Commissar Braddock isn't going to leave this base again, unless it's in a box." He closed the panel and bolted it securely, before getting to his feet and hefting the spanner in his right hand. "We'd better get out of here before we get some of those other personnel I mentioned asking difficult questions."
"Good idea," David muttered, feeling his feet take him to the door more quickly than he'd originally intended. He closed his hand around the handle and pulled it open – and found himself looking right into the barrel of a .38 pistol.
"Hello, David," Emma Frost said. "I think you'd better show me just what you were planning to do to Commissar Braddock, don't you?"