Chapter Six
At the end of a long, winding series of tunnels- helpfully marked by flickering lanterns- the Brotherhood paused in front of another metal hatch. Lance set his hand on it and closed his eyes, once more extending his senses to the vibrations travelling throughout the building above.
It gave him an idea of the layout. People were harder- but a scuff of a shoe here, the tap of a foot there…
“Ten, maybe twelve of them,” he said, finally. “Just in the room above us. More in the rest of the building. I think they’re waiting for us.”
“Poor bastards,” quipped Tabby.
Lance grinned, but it turned quickly to a scowl. “There’s something else. The whole building… it’s moving just with the wind. I think it’s about ready to fall down. If we go in and start smashing shit up all over the place…”
“Like we always do,” put in Pietro.
“We’ll bring the whole place down.”
“Probably on purpose,” said Todd. “They figured somebody would roll up to shut them down- Mags or the X-geeks or Lance’s one-eyed secret boyfriend.”
“Wait, is that Cyclops or Fury?” Asked Pietro.
“He said X-geeks already,” shot back Tabby.
“Can we… just until we deal with the guys with guns waiting to kill us, focus?” Lance asked through clenched teeth.
“Yo, what I’m saying- they know this way no one can start through power blasts or whatever around with bringing the roof down. Sorry, Lance, I know how much you love to rock and roll.”
Lance nodded, slowly. “It’s going to be rough,” he said. “Anyone wants to back out before we go up?”
There was a long moment of silence. “I told you,” said Todd. “I ain’t walking away from this again.”
Tabby kicked the ground of the tunnel. “She tried to drug me, Lance. If I hadn’t had a pretty good idea what I was walking into… I could have come here, looking for help if Xavier hadn’t found me. That could have been for real. Let’s shut the bastards down.”
Pietro sighed. “Well, obviously I’m too smart and quick and clever and good looking to ever fall for this sort of trap,” he said. “But someone’s got to take care of you three freaks.”
Lance grinned, with something like real feeling this time, looking around at… okay, he’d say it, but only ever in his own head… his team. “Okay.” He said. “Here’s what we do.”
***
Boom-Boom blew the latch and hinges off the hatch with a trio of carefully placed timebombs. Before the echo of the blast off the far wall had hit Avalanche, Quicksilver was through, launching himself up the ladder, grabbing the heavy metal hatch and flinging it, discus style, into one of the waiting gun-thugs.
Then he was among them, disarming about half the dozen men in the room in the time it took the other half to react. He was far from gentle about it- Avalanche had said “Red Targets,” and more than one of them was left with broken bones in their hands, wrists, or ankles.
Then he was gone, moving on to search the rest of the building for the captured mutant children. That had been a tough call- with Blob gone, Quicksilver had the power set best suited to dealing with men with guns- especially without risking collapsing the entire building. But as fast as he was, even he couldn’t dodge a room full of bullets, and even as he was leaving the room, fingers were tightening on triggers.
The key here was that he was already gone, and after his entrance and hard as he was to follow with the naked eye, no one was left looking at the hatch as their bullets punched impotently into a blank wall. Which gave Boom-Boom enough time to pop up and throw two handfuls of time bombs.
They were small ones- more sound and light than actual concussive force, but when they were going off in your face, they were certainly enough to make you flinch and- Avalanche hoped- keep you from doing much in the way of aiming.
He was counting on that, in fact, because as Boom-Boom jumped back down and out of the way, he and Toad were charging through the hatchway. She would be back up in a moment with another volley of time bombs, but each second until that happened held the possibility of someone drawing a bead on him or Toad, or just firing wildly.
For an instant, he thought he was dead, as a cold eyed gun-thug locked gazes with him and raised a machine pistol. Then Toad’s tongue whipped around the man’s wrist, pulling the pistol up to fire into the ceiling- fortunately just as Toad was leaping from it to the wall.
There was no time to think about how close he had just come, though, because another man was about to let loose with a shotgun blast at Toad. Avalanche’s shoulder took him in the chest, and the two tumbled to the ground, Avalanche manning to roll so that the other man fell on top of him, putting the man’s bulk between him and the rest of the guns for a moment.
The man’s reflexes were almost as good- he lashed his head forward, and Avalanche saw stars for a moment. He recovered his senses just in time to tuck his head down and see the knife that had been driving towards his face glance off his helmet. He let out a brief exultant ha- that was for everyone who had made fun of the fruit bowl look- and his fist drove up into the man’s face once, twice, three times, then, while he was stunned, Avalanche shoved the bulk of him off and rose to his feet, thanking god for steel toed boots as he drove his foot into the man’s ribcage.
One man was trying vainly to wipe Toad’s slime out of his eyes- another was on the ground clutching his stomach and retching. That was all Avalanche had time to take in, because there was a gun going off. He thought he had been shot- certainly the impact snapped his head back and left him staggered for a moment, but he didn’t seem to be dead- it had just passed through his helmet.
He stooped and grabbed the shotgun the man he had just tackled had been using, and swung it like a club, feeling something crunch on the other end as the stock caught the man who had almost shot him in the face.
Another round of timebombs went off. He had lived with Boom-Boom on and off for years, and he was fairly certain she wasn’t going to accidentally blow his head off. All the same, it was disorienting as hell. Worse for the gun-thugs, who didn’t have any such insider knowledge.
He swung his makeshift club again, and his target howled as it impacted a kneecap. Then someone already on the ground grabbed Avalanche’s ankle, and he went down again.
***
Quicksilver frowned. Room after room was empty- bunk beds with manacles attached, bare bones kitchen, a small armory- currently worryingly depleted by the men fighting his friends downstairs, the building had obviously been fitted out to hold a number of prisoners, and there was no sign that any had been evacuated in a hurry.
Maybe they had shut these guys down before they could actually take any prisoners or maybe it had just been a slow week, either way, what were they supposed to do if there was no one here?
He came to a heavy metal door, locked, with a keypad, that was more like it. “Where’shtelittlefrogboywhenyouneedhim?” He groused to himself, inputting a four digit code at random.
A harsh buzz told him that was incorrect and more importantly, a string of Cyrillic characters and a five showed up, informing him of… something, he’d have to learn Russian one of these days, if they were going to make a habit of this sort of thing which he couldn’t really see why they would- he was here to backup his friends, but they had tried playing heroes before and see how well that had gone?
He put in another code and got the same harsh buzzing and the same message in Cyrillic except that now the five was a four which meant that it was counting the number of wrong attempts he could input before it locked down permanently or exploded or did something else equally dire, and he couldn’t risk that- he could go back down and get Toad who had a way with locks, especially if there was something belonging to someone else behind them and anyways he shouldn’t have left them down there with all the angry men with guns.
“Three-nine-five-seven. That’s the code.” Someone was shouting through the door, must have been about as soon as he got there because that was only a second ago.
He shrugged and put in the code. “Don’tworrywe’reheretohelpwherearetheothers?” He exhaled as he threw open the door.
A scrawny, filthy, bruised boy looked up at him, wide eyed, actually, unbelievably wide-eyed, like, enlarged mutant eyes-wide. “It’s just me,” he said. “There were supposed to be others but the giant said ‘It’s not worth the risk to build inventory.’ Anybody who didn’t have a useful power they sold right away.”
Quicksilver blinked at that, and wondered who he was going to hurt to make himself feel better about hearing that particular sentence, of course there were plenty of candidates downstairs, but he couldn’t just leave the kid.
The kid glanced at the floor. “They need your help,” he said. “I’ll be fine. All the Russians are down there trying to kill your friends.”
Quicksilver flinched at the words, then set his teeth. “I’m not leaving you here,” he said. Forcing himself to speak slowly and intelligibly. “Close your eyes.”
He picked the boy up, wincing again at how light he was, and started running, meaning to go out the front door but it was locked, really quite extensively locked, it might have been welded shut actually, which made sense, because they had only intended people to come in and out of here by secret, probably the building was labeled as condemned on the outside.
Also there were more men with guns running towards the room with the hatch. Pietro closed his eyes and took a moment to gather himself. “Staydown,” he said, depositing the kid behind the heavy frame of the door, and turning to the Russians. “Heyboys,” he said. “Let’sdance.”
***
They were going to lose. It didn’t change anything at this point, really. There was no way Avalanche was going to go down any way but fighting, but as yet another group of men rounded the corner, it was getting harder to see any path to a win.
He kicked someone trying to get to their feet, and felt something give way in their ribcage. At least they had bought time for Quicksilver to get the kid. “Toad, go!” He called out, just before a fist impacted his jaw. There was no time to see if Toad had made it- someone was trying to drive a knife between his ribs.
He grabbed their wrist and drove his helmet into the bridge of their nose. They stumbled back a step, lashing out wildly, and he felt a thin line of fire across his stomach. “Oh,” he muttered. “You want to rock? Let’s rock!”
He was ready to call on his power, to bring the room down on the whole murderous pack of them, when the man in front of him was violently pulled backwards, the base of their skull colliding with Toad’s foot.
“Man,” said Toad, spitting theatrically. “These guys do not taste good.”
Lance glanced around- Quicksilver, Toad, and Boom-Boom were standing in front of them, each with the same “I can’t believe we just did that,” expression as they surveyed the room full of unconscious and disabled thugs.
“I thought I told you to get the kid and get out,” he told Quicksilver.
“And I thought I told you not to get all my friends murdered by Russian thugs,” Quicksilver shot back.
“I don’t remember you saying that,” put in Toad.
Quicksilver rolled his eyes. “It was implied.”
“Wait, are you saying we’re you’re friends?” Boom-Boom asked. “Hey, guys, Quicksilver loves us.”
“Don’t get-”
“You looooooove us,” interrupted Toad, throwing his arms around Quicksilver.
“Idiots.” One of the Russians was clambering to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall. “You think you have won anything?”
Avalanche crossed the distance between them and grabbed him by the shoulders, pinning him to the wall. “At last count, we’re the ones left standing.”
“You defeat a few foot soldiers and think the war is done? You have no idea. You are dead. The boy is dead. Everyone you love, dead. You think you are big time heroes? When the storm comes, you will be nothing.”
Avalanche grinned and drew back his fist. “You know, you guys actually helped me figure something out today. I haven’t felt this together in a long while. I don’t want to be a hero…”