Chapter 16

(Logan)

We cleaned up as much of Angela's blood as we could before we slipped out a window in the small office at the back of the bunker, not wanting to chance that there would be more guards waiting out in front. It took us a little longer to get back to the warehouse, since we were limiting ourselves to sticking close to buildings whenever possible, though we still had one encounter with a couple guards. We made quick work of them, killing them silently before they had even a chance to alert anyone. Finally, we got back to the warehouse and sure enough, there was a ladder in the back that led to the roof. We scrambled up before anyone noticed us and hid behind an air conditioning unit to plan our next steps.

I peered through a nearby skylight to the warehouse below. There were several large, bulky shapes covered with tarps that could have been anything from stacked crates to vehicles, soldiers swarming all over the place like ants. I couldn't make out what anyone was saying down there, but I'm sure it had at least something to do with us. After all, both Angela and I had our own "signature" ways of killing people; my own claws left distinctive stab wounds, she really like ripping out throats. I was hoping that Gambit was still an unknown quantity to them and that they thought we'd used grenades or some other explosives on those soldiers who'd been blown up. No puns intended, but he was our ace in the hole.

I turned back to the other two. "All right, it looks like they're still pretty confused down there, so I'm guessin' they don't know where we went. An' as Hellcat here'll tell you, people don't expect attacks from above."

"Oh hell no, you're not thinking what I think you're thinking." Angela said with a glance to the skylight.

"Actually, I am." I looked at Gambit. "Cajun, I don't think they know you're here yet, so you get to be the secret weapon."

"Oui, mon ami." He replied. "What's the plan?"

"Well, there's a catwalk 'bout ten feet below this skylight, the floor's 'bout thirty all told. Think you'll be able to land on that catwalk an' blow some o' them crates or whatever they got covered up down there?"

"Consider it done."

"Good." I turned back to Angela. "Now, I know you don't like droppin' thirty feet, but ya know you can make it."

"Yeah, I do," she replied, "and you're also right I don't like jumping that far. But hell, I survived bigger drops than this back in the Bad Old Days, right?"

"Just what I was thinkin'. Now me an' you'll go first. Gambit, I want you right behind us with those cards o' yours ready to go. I'm hopin' that you can blow somethin' before we even hit the ground. Don't worry 'bout hurtin' us, we can take a lot more abuse than you can imagine."

"Will it not take ma petit chat much longer to heal?" He asked with concern.

"It's a chance we have to take. Worst case scenario, you'll get her the hell outta here to heal up an' I'll take the rest of this place out on my own."

"Wolverine, there is no way, no way I'm gonna let that happen," she said with a scowl. "If the three of us can't stay together, then we'll abort the whole damned thing and come back later."

"This is not a debate, darlin'."

"I beg to differ. They were ready for us, they've got something in those darts designed to stop us. They took Totem out with half a dozen of them and you've already taken a few hits."

"An' I'm still standin' an' still a hundred percent." Ok, so I was really more like ninety percent, but she didn't need to know that. "I'm pretty sure I can take a few more shots before it'll be a problem."

"If they take you down, I don't know if I'll be able to get you back out of here!" She leaned forward and gave me a hard stare. "Not without bringing in the X-Men and we already agreed to leave them out of this completely until we were finished." I swore softly and she smiled in satisfaction. "See, you know I'm right."

"Fine. If we can't all make it through, we'll abort. Now get in position, we have work to do."

We stood in a cluster and I waited for a space in the middle of the floor below to clear before making my move. Gambit already had a handful of cards, charged up and ready to go when I took a deep breath and jumped through the skylight, Angela right behind me. Glass showered the floor below and soldiers dove out of the way to avoid being cut to ribbons by the shards. I heard Gambit hit the catwalk above and as soon as my feet hit the floor, three huge explosions rolled through the warehouse as his cards found their targets. I instinctively reached over and grabbed Angela, throwing her to the floor with myself on top of her, covering her from the worst of the flying debris. I could hear her cursing as she struggled against me, knowing that I'd done what I did to keep her safe. When the last of the heat washed over me, I sprang to my feet and popped my claws, looking for something to kill.

At least two of the tarps had been covering some kind of vehicles, which were now nothing more than heaps of twisted metal. The last one had been covering crates, but whatever they'd held was now completely destroyed. I stalked through the wreckage, looking for a target, but all I found were bodies. I heard a clattering behind me and I turned, but it was only Gambit coming down the metal stairs from the catwalk above. He grinned at me and gave an exaggerated bow. "No need to thank Gambit." He said.

"Too bad, you're getting it anyway." Angela said and did something I never thought I'd live to see; she hugged him. "Perfect placement. I don't think there's anyone else alive in here."

"At least not up here." I replied and scanned the warehouse again. "C'mon, the entrance is probably back here and I'm sure that little display's gonna bring the rest of 'em back in no time."

The two of them nodded and we rushed to the back of the warehouse, where we found the expected office complete with hidden door to the lower levels. I shook my head with a bit of disbelief; you would think they'd hide these doors better, but once the military gets an idea in its head, it doesn't much like to change. I pried the door open with my claws and found myself facing an elevator shaft as opposed to a stairwell. The only light came in from the office I was standing in and I swore under my breath. I can see pretty well in low light and so can Angela, but Gambit had human eyes (for all that they were bright red), so he was going to have a much harder time of it. "Ok Hellcat, you go first, Gambit in the middle an' I'll take rearguard."

"Roger," Angela replied and slipped in front of me. She felt around until she found the service ladder to the left of the door and started her descent. Gambit waited a few seconds before following her, but I hung back a little longer to make sure no one was coming. I reached over and swung myself onto the ladder, then reached back and did my best to close the door over the opening. It left a gap of about two inches, but as long as no one looked too closely, they wouldn't notice and I was hoping they wouldn't waste the time to do more than glance in to make sure we weren't in the office. We climbed about forty feet before coming to the top of the actual elevator car. "Ok, now what?" Angela asked.

"Well, we can go back up an' try to find the first sublevel or just start here." I replied.

"Nah, we'll go from the bottom up. You know how they are, they never expect it and we've not done it that way for a few months now."

"Mm, it's no wonder why I love you, tiger." She smiled at me and I gave her wink before popping my claws and slashing through the top of the passenger car. We dropped in and I wasn't surprised to see the light in there was red. Of course the whole place was on high alert, but they were still expecting us to be topside where the mayhem was. I paused at the elevator doors and listened for movement, but I didn't hear anything. I wedged one of my claws in the crack and forced the doors open just enough to look out, but there was no one in the immediate area. I pried them open enough to slip through the gap, but no one took a shot at me and I waved the others out before letting the doors slide closed again. I sniffed the air, but if anyone was nearby they had no scent to speak of and since that's simply not possible, I nodded in satisfaction. "All right Hellcat, I want you an' Gambit to…"

"Absolutely not," She hissed. "We are not splitting up and that's final."

I rolled my eyes with a sigh. "Darlin', we don't have time to…"

"No, what we don't have time for is arguing. We stick together. If all five of us were still here, it'd be one thing, but we're not. So this is how it is, deal with it."

Damned stubborn woman. "Look, I understand where you're comin' from, but this'll go a lot quicker if we go in two teams."

"I'm not leaving you alone, damn it! We're better off together and you know it."

I gritted my teeth, feeling the seconds slip by. "Fine, but if we find anyone, I'm expectin' you to get 'em outta here, understood?"

She scowled at me, but nodded, then looked both ways down the hall. "We'll go left first."

"You always go left first," I muttered, but followed her anyway. There weren't any doors off this hallway, which seemed damned odd to me, but the next intersection gave us several to choose from. Most of them were offices that were empty due to the emergency on the levels over our heads. Only one was occupied and had it not been for the stink of blood and cordite, it would have appeared that the man in there had fallen asleep over his computer. However, the gun in his hand and the fact that the back of his head was missing showed that he'd killed himself rather than risk facing us.

Angela spent a few moments going over his computer, but he'd wiped everything off the drive except for the message that was displayed on the screen when we came in. It was short and to the point. "Please forgive me for what I've done to you." Kind of hard to do when he was dead, but he was the first person in all these years who'd done our job for us. Still, his cabinets were full of files and cd-roms, so Angela stacked them on the edge of the desk for us to retrieve on our way out. The rest of the rooms in this hall were either bare or used for storage, so we backtracked to where we'd started and continued our search.

I was correct when I assumed they'd never expect us to start at the bottom, a tactic that we didn't employ often due to circumstances, but we play the hand we're dealt. We came to another intersection to the right of the elevator, but this hallway only had two doors that led off of it. Naturally, we went left first and paused in front of the double door. I peeked through the window, then burst into the lab I saw on the other side. It was empty of anyone actually working, but it wasn't unoccupied. Alonng the far wall stood a series of tubes, each one holding a person. I would have assumed they were dead, except that there was a monitor hooked to each one that tracked their vitals. There were six in total, four men and two women, naked with probes and wires sticking out of them from all over. I growled when I saw them, then looked around for a way to get them out of there without killing them.

"Mon dieu! What is dis?" Gambit asked, looking a bit pale.

Angela was working quickly on a computer terminal. "Evolution." She replied as she typed. "Looks like they keep the new subjects in these tubes instead of the tank they used for us. Ah, here it is!" She entered a command and the lights on the monitors changed from yellow to green. "All right, open them up, but I can't promise they'll be awake."

I didn't need to be asked twice. I popped my claws and started slashing at the glass tubes, Gambit and Angela catching the people as they slid out with the fluid onto the floor. They pulled as many wires and probes as they safely could, then Gambit went in search of some kind of clothes to put on them. By the time he came back, the first of them was coming around slowly.

Angela was at his side in a flash. "Hey, you're all right now, ok? We're friends." She soothed as his eyes grew wild and he looked around. "We're gonna get you out of here, but I need you to help me, ok?"

"What the…where is he?" The man asked, looking around.

"Where's who?"

"Mm, don't know his name. Some doctor, I think." He shook his head. "Give me a minute."

She nodded and moved on to the next person. In the space of about ten minutes, they'd all come around and were in various stages of coherence ranging from groggy to terrified. The last was a girl who was barely eighteen years old and it took Angela another precious five minutes to get her calm enough to put on the scrubs Remy found. She calmed down a bit once she was dressed, but her eyes were still wild and she refused to say anything. I went back over to the first guy, who was sitting off to the side alone, holding his head in hands. "Hey bub, you got a name?"

He looked up at me slowly. "Yeah, I'm Evan…" he trailed off, then snorted bitterly. "Would you believe I don't remember my last name?"

"Yeah, I would," I replied. "What can you do?"

"What do you…oh, you mean my mutation, don't you?" His eyes narrowed and he stood up. "Why do you care?"

"Look, I ain't with these assholes, all right? Not for a long time. I got away, over twenty years ago," I jerked my head towards Angela, "an' so did she. We got another friend who got away 'bout ten years ago. Now we're gonna help you get outta here."

"For what? I have nothing to go back to, no family, they took it all away from me."

"If there's one thing I've learned over all this time…even if ya got nothin' left to lose, there's always one thing you can get."

"Really? And what would that be?"

I smiled coldly and Evan took a step back. "Revenge."

"Th-that's why you're here, isn't it? Both of you?" I nodded and he looked down. I watched as he turned it over in his mind, the offer I was making him. When he looked back at me, his eyes were solid black and stiff spines were starting to sprout from his hands and forearms. "I'm in."

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One of them didn't make it out of the lab, a guy whose name we never learned. Whatever they'd been doing to those people had been too much for him and he died on the floor. I know that the healing factor, when compared to other powers, isn't really that big of a deal and that some people heal better than others. But watching that poor guy die because his power was overwhelmed by whatever it was they did to him made me feel mortal all over again, the first time since the night I almost killed Marie.

Of the other five, only four were in any shape to give us a hand. Three men and one woman, all feral, all pissed off. One guy, Nathan was his name, reminded me of Wolfsbane back home in that he could shift to a full animal form, only his was a mountain lion. The other guy, Billy, was more like me, which shocked the hell out of me. His claws were a lot shorter, only about six inches long, but he had three on each hand and I wondered if old Tom Logan had gotten around a lot more than he let on back in the day. Or maybe it was Howlett who got around. I still don't know which one was my real father, I'll probably never know. Still, seeing those claws pop out of Billy was a real eye-opener. And there was Evan, with his black eyes and three-inch spines that covered him from elbow to knuckles. Last was Joanna, who had seven-inch retractable spikes in the palms of her hands that were poisonous. The other girl was like a robot, not speaking and only moving if prodded. Nathan took charge of her, saying that he wasn't much of a fighter anyway, but would do his best to keep her alive so we could take her back to the mansion with us. Fair enough. We now had seven people, although the four new ones really didn't care if they made it out alive.

In the end, they didn't. They put up a hell of a fight, each of them got their revenge, but we couldn't save them. I should've known better, should've suspected they were still in the pre-bonding stages, but they wanted to help, wanted their own slice of vengeance. Joanna died with her spikes buried in the chests of the same soldiers who cut her down. Billy took a bullet meant for Angela, the hole in his back big enough to put my fist in and he died in her arms. Nathan bought it protecting the other girl, shifting into his mountain lion form and killing seven men before they took him down. And Evan…he threw himself on a grenade tossed by one of the last six men still standing by the time we made it topside. Four new subjects, four people I wished like hell we could have saved, four more ghosts to follow me around. Four more people I have to avenge because I just couldn't protect them.

We torched the place before we left, letting all of it burn. Remy held onto the files we took out with us, at least a few of which looked to be more promising than anything else we'd ever brought out with us. A little voice in the back of my head kept telling me they were planted, that they were nothing but bait in a trap, but I didn't care. We already knew it was a trap, no matter how long we put it off. We knew where we had to go, what we had to do and that we might not make it out of that one. Area 51 was still waiting for us, a snare that was set to bring us back in. We would go there, eventually, we would walk into the fire and hope it didn't burn us. But that was for later. I turned my back on the ashes of this place that was more than just a grave for the bastards who did this to us. Underneath the bloody word, I wrote their names so no one would forget. Evan. Billy. Nathan. Joanna. Vengeance is yours, too.

AN: Well, here it is finally...another update...now, don't get TOO excited...i still have lots of stuff to do in my personal life that takes precedent, so please forgive me if the next update isn't in the expected four days...many heartfelt thanks to everyone who's sent me well wishes, prayers and good thoughts, they are most appreciated...Special thanks to my beta readers, Zac and Turiel Tincdaniel, for making sure this made sense...Extra Special thanks to DBK(tm) for being so wonderful and supportive...Super Special thanks to my readers, for being patient with me through my tough time...and Super Swanky Special thanks to my reviewers, who were levanna, theNightEnchantress and a new name, Nataku's Wrath...:) levanna: Hope this chapter had a bit more of what you were expecting...NightEnchantress: Thanks for the review! NW: Thank you so much for your wonderful words! And yeah, i torture Logan a bit...i've often wondered why those of us who love him so insist on being so mean to him, but really...it's so much fun to do!

Now if you've been reading and haven't reviewed, why not try it now? I swear, i'll post a new chapter if you do!