Disclaimer: I don't own any characters except Irbis and several innocent short-lived bystanders; everything else is Marvel's only.

6. Runaways

Amidst the darkness of his dreamless sleep, Creed experienced a sense of sudden vertigo that had his body react instintively. His senses picked up on the grumbling in a foreign language, and his awakening conscience identified a sudden swerve as the source of the previous sense of vertigo.

"I told ya not ta wake me up, frail!" Creed kept his eyes closed, ready to doze off again, as he heard Irbis apologise and complain about 'tooning'.

"If ya can't handle it, why d'ya ask ta drive in the first place?" And then in a whispered grumble: "Moron."

He could feel the car speeding up, as well as listen to two very potent engines.

"Segure-se, Mr Creed. I'm going to uh... stop."

Creed hardly had time to hold on to the back of the front seat when Irbis hit the brakes hard. Then the car swerved to the left, sped up and swerved to the right, thumping onto something.

"What the hell ya doing, girl?!"

"Eu disse-lhe," she sounded annoyed but collected. "Os filhos da p- are trying to push me out off de road."

Creed almost got up but then thought against it, and let himself slide down to the small space between the back and the front seats. From there, he could more easily check the girl's moves.

"Lure'em out o' the road."

"What?!"

"I said, lure'em out o' the road. It's time we get ourselves a new ride."

"Leave de road? OK..." Irbis was speeding up, not getting her eyes out of the road and the two tuning cars. "Can I beat against de oder cars?"

"This ain't my car. Do yer worse."

He was pleasantly surprised with her quickness of hands and feet. She swerved along with the tuning cars, alternately speeding and braking, with the help of gears to improve the engine's response. Soon, she swerved the car fully towards the hood of one of the cars which was presently falling slightly behind her. The other driver swerved too strongly to the left, and Irbis followed him all the way until they were out of the road.

"Get out and on the driver, quick." Creed instructed, as he heard the second car stopping and then approach his fallen partner. Irbis didn't even say anything and simply looked back at Creed, shocked at his idea.

"Do it, ya moron! I've taught ya enough fer ya ta be able t'hang on fer a few minutes." Well, he had, even if she had only learnt enough to hang on for a few seconds. But that wasn't his fault. "Just lure 'em both out o' the cars so they can't speed out o' here."

Hesitantly, Irbis started moving out of the car. From his hiding spot, Creed couldn't see anything, but he could hear that two kids had got off the marooned car, one of them a girl; and that the driver of the second car had opened the door, probably remaining ready to fall back in and speed off. He heard Irbis being insulted and threatened as the kids from the first car moved in on her.

Irbis started backing away from the enraged youths. Creed saw her go around the hood, the other two following behind. Only then, when he saw them for the first time, did he notice they weren't teens, but were rather in their twenties. The woman had a tough Goth look, and the guy looked like a mama's boy. Swiftly, he opened the left back door and got out unseen. Irbis was quickly approaching the second car, whose driver Creed could now see: he could have been the Goth chick's twin brother.

Creed waited until the Goth guy moved away from his car and towards Irbis. The girl looked more anxious than scared, probably waiting for his intervention anytime, while the three tuners surrounded her. The Goth chick moved in for the kill first, with a well aimed punch that had Irbis falling square on the floor. Dumb as the girl was, she didn't even try to kick back. He ought to let them work her up a bit, see if they could get her to react. Unfortunately, he wasn't interested either in wasting his time waiting, or in having the girl damaged.

Taking advantage of the distraction Irbis was affording, he walked up to the group. When they realized the trap, it was too late.

"Mrs. Winters! Mrs. Winters!"

The middle-aged woman set her hands on her hips and shook her head. Something was definitely wrong. The old lady always tended to her garden in the morning, even if only to check that no rabbits or snails had showed up during the night. Granted that, sometimes, she preferred spending the morning taking care of her home potted plants, but she still would have come out to check on the garden before lunch. Besides, the gentle old lady always took some minutes to chat about something.

She walked back to her house, decidedly, and went straight to the phone.

"Who're you callin'?"

"Well, who do you think I'm calling, Stanley? The police, obviously."

Stanley shook his head. "Why don't you just leave the folks alone, Mina? Ya're constantly bugging them. If I were Mrs. Winter I'd have moved by now!"

"Oh, shut up, you! It's past midday already and the house is as quiet as if it was abandoned. Can't you see that something has to be wrong?"

Stanley shrugged and decided to lie down for a while. He didn't want to be around when the police showed up to find out the neighbours were just sleeping in a little; and he sure as hell didn't want to be in his wife's way after being scolded by the police for being nosey.

Irbis was leaning on the seat holding an icy beer can onto her face, while Creed drove their new set of wheels: a black beauty with a boosted up engine and a disco-worth sound system.

Irbis hadn't said a word since Creed had broken the tuners' necks and instructed her on how to use the beer cans they had found in an ice-box on the car's back seat. The radio was playing, the hard metal CDs having been quickly discarded by the man, and Creed seemed annoyed in his stern silence.

Irbis changed the position of the can on her face and sighed.

"Shut yer yap, girl! That's ta teach ya ta use some o' the stuff I taught ya!" He growled hotly, much to Irbis's surprise. "I don't know why I wasted my time with ya fer so blasted long."

"I am not complaining, Mister Creed."

Her quiet assertiveness only further spiced the man's bad mood.

"Well, I AM!" Irbis half-flinched at his booming voice. "Ya drove like a pro, ya pushed the ass-hole off the road just fine… an' then ya let's 'em punks kick the hell out o' ya! What the blazes would ya've done if I hadn't been there, huh? Geez! Ya take out a mercenary, ya torture 'im, and then ya lets punks – blasted, harmless punks! – beat ya up! Explain ta me just what on Earth is wrong with ya, girl. What!"

Irbis looked down, torn between remaining quiet and answering. Soon, though, she changed her mind, because Creed had continued grumbling about her stupidity, her dumb helplessness, her…

"So I'm stupid, pronto!" He growled at the interruption. "Is just dat I couldn't move, OK? I didn't stop wid de guy in de cave but I stopped wid dis guys. I don't know why, I just stopped. I'm sorry!"

Creed continued grumbling for some more time while Irbis went back to her sullen silence, fighting the feeling of uselessness she knew wasn't true. Couldn't be.

"Colonel!" The tall man looked away from the screen, where he was once more going over the surveillance video, and looked at Froggie. "We got 'im , Sir."

That was all the older man needed to hear, and he was immediately on his feet.

"The local police are completely nuts over this, Colonel," Froggie continued, "it's like they ain't ever seen a murder before. It was an old couple who lived near the dam's reservoir. They've been killed and their car's missing. A neighbour thought something was wrong when there was no movement all morning and called the cops. Their necks were broken, which doesn't match Sabretooth's usual MO, but it's got to be him."

Narrowing his eyes but not glancing at his man, the Colonel growled under his breath. "What's the car plate and description?"

"It's an Oldsmobile, a beige Cutlass Ciera sedan. It's got a New Mexico plate, QLC-959."

"Keep tabs on the police communications; I want to know when they find the vehicle. I also want a list of all the safe-houses and suppliers Creed has in the area. His mutant healing factor won't have processed the toxins before 24 to 30 hours, which means we have until tonight at 11 to engage and bring him down. Have Doc and Murdock finished the inventory on the poisoned ammo?"

"Yes, sir. Last I checked, Doc was preparing darts with an extra dosage for a faster effect. Murdock's assistin' him."

"Good." He should have checked on it himself instead of going over the footage from Creed's escape endlessly. He'd seen all there was to see, which wasn't even much to start with. "That's good. Have Stallone and Doberman go over the safe-houses with you. Mark the best options... he'll have to go to a safe place to get his strength back, and will certainly want to up his chances with something more besides his mutant powers."

"Yes, Sir. I'll get right on to it."

The Colonel watched his man walk away. He had already regretted having accepted Paolo Torini's contract, even if it was worth a large fortune. The old man had sent seven of his own men to help in the hunt, and that extra help had taken the brunt of the casualties: three dead men, two severely wounded, a sixth only lightly wounded. Bennet Wilson didn't give a damn about them. They had been amateurs who'd brought it onto themselves. His brother, though, was another story. Greg was an accountat. Yes, he'd been in the army; yes, he'd been in a war scenario; yes, he loved a good hunt. He was still just an accountat and only participated in the tracking of their quarry, never in the live fire situations. Greg was just an accountant. And his little brother.

Wilson massaged his temples, to diminish the burning sensation in his eyes, and returned to the surveillance video. He once more studied the way the woman broke free, how she'd thrown the fire extinguisher and then got a hold of the axe. His body tensed when the blade severed his brother's leg, just as he pushed the emergency button that sealed off the doors and his fate. The tension kept building as the woman coldly used the knife on him to force him to talk. Every time his little brother screamed, the sound bore into the deepest of his soul where it ecchoed endlessly. When the video showed Creed slitting his throat, his muscles would relax slightly, only to tense again at the image of the woman standing up and marching cooly towards the cave tunnels.

She looked Hispanic, but she wasn't Spanish-speaking, nor French nor Italian, since Froggie swore those languages leave an easy to spot accent. He was pretty sure she wasn't an American, though... The only name he had to go on was the name she'd given earlier, Marta dos Santos Pereira, which was a Portuguese name. If the nationality was right, even if the name was fake, that meant she was either from Brazil or from Portugal. Or any ex-Portuguese colony: Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Goa, Timor, Macao...

Wilson set the video to the beginning, studying every line of the woman's face, every movement, every sound. He studied the determination she stabbed her brother with. Cold, detached, deliberate. She had masked her true colours under the cover of harmlessness, but in the end had shown herself to be a psycopath.

How could he have got that darned bitch so wrong?

In the temporary silence after once more switching the radio off, Creed's eyes rebelled for the first time. It was only 12.40 and he was still facing at least four hours of driving! He snarled at the aggravation and switched the darned radio again, straight into a deadly interpretation of Kenny Rogers's 'Lucille'. It could lull to sleep an insomniac! He changed abruptly to another station only to be received by Justin Timberlake's voice. He didn't even bother to hear what he was singing; he hated those pretty-boys-wanna-be's too much to care. The rap noise that followed cringed on his nerves and he switched to another station where Dolly Parton's voice wailed 'what a heartache, what a heartache'. Next came a guitar solo in some truck driving song. He didn't like it at all, but at least it would neither lull him to sleep nor spur him into a berserker rage.

When the song finally came to an end, Creed's exasperated mind was greeted by an actually soothing well-known tune. The piano followed the drummer's beat, overscored by a four man brassband, and Creed nearly sighed in relief, switching the volume up. When the man's raspy voice made its appearance, Creed started drumming distractedly on the driving wheel. It was a song he particularly liked and there had better be no messing it up, the way he'd been progressively aggravated for the last 24 hours.

Then he noticed the girl, who'd been wise enough to stay motionless since they had got the new car, rocking to the rhythm of the song, her fingers drumming the rhythm on the still cold beer can on her lap. It was good to know she had some musical good taste, outside her classical music universe. But then another voice joined the singer's, begging "take off your dress. Yes, yes, yes!" He wouldn't have picked it up, hadn't it been for his heightened senses and took a second look at the girl. Irbis was looking at the tedious fields while mouthing the lyrics to the window pane of her door, her body following the beat of the song faithfully. "You can leave your hat on! You can leave…"

"Whatchya doin'?"

"Hun?" She turned sharply to the blond, who continued eyeing her critically, his hands still drumming the wheel. Creed could clearly see the searing heat exploding on her cheeks, making them handsomely red. "Uh… I was only… uh… It… Is a really nice music. I mean everyone likes 'Leave your hat on', right?"

"Likin' a music don't mean actin' like ya just escaped from a loony house." He grunted, enjoying her embarrassment and wanting to make it last for his own entertainment.

"Uh, pois. Eu…" She swallowed hard and tried to ignore her awkwardness, even if Creed could still enjoy the sight of her glowing cheeks. "I suppose you like de song too? I like very much de voice off de singer, de way he says de letters more dan simply sing dem."

Creed gave her his best stone stare and enjoyed her uneasiness. But then she shook her head and looked at the landscape to the right, getting over her own shame with an almost unconscious shrug. "I like very much music. I suppose is one off de most important things in my life. I know Portuguese music very, very well, but only some more famous American musics, like Beatles, and Madonna, and Bryan Adams..."

"That would be singers, not 'musics'; 'sides they're British, American and Canadian, respectively, oh music-knows-it-all."

Obviously, the girl didn't take the hint. "Pois, eu quis dizer dat dey sing in English. Mas de qualquer modo, I learn dis music a long time ago and I really like it. And oder musics like... uh... 'simple things', 'you're so beautiful', 'have a little fais in me'... hmm... I suppose I just like Cock, in general."

"What?!"

Irbis looked at him criptically, while Creed just wondered when the girl would finally learn...

"I… I said dat I like de majority off de musics of Cock." She grimaced, and bit her lip. "Não, não, is not Cock... Uh... But is similar, tenho a certeza... Cock... Cock..."

"Cocker. Joe Cocker." He surprised himself chuckling softly. "Not cock."

"Ah, bolas, pois é." Irbis shook her head half-laughing. "Cock is de animal; de chicken male, right?"

Creed laughed, suddenly in a good, though mischievous, mood.

"What? What do I say wrong?" But Creed just snickered and told her that yupe, the male chicken was definitely called cock. At least by the Brits, it was.

Irbis didn't seem to buy it, but didn't insist either, and returned to silence. Creed switched the radio off, sensing a less aggravating entertainment in talking to the girl.

"Ya turned out a better driver than I thought. Where d'ya learn ta drive?"