Chapter 46: Boom, Boom, Boom Redux
Yvette turned her camcorder to the sky and caught a handful of jet fighters passing by.
Boom, boom, boom. The very core of New York City shook and Yvette dove behind a dumpster for cover. Tunnels of flames consuming all that was burnable surrounding both sides of the alley. The rush of flaming air and jaw shaking intensity painted an image of hell on earth in the woman’s mind. Besides the booms, nothing else made a bead of noise. Mutants, humans, and animals caught in the blast had no chance to scream. Falling debris disintegrated. The cement smoked.
Even when the towers of orange faded into smoldering bonfires, the New York night felt like a blistering train engine furnace.
“Hell on earth,” Yvette whispered to herself, “The fall of Manhattan.”
It sounded like a fine title for this documentary. Culled from the footage of flying superhumans, city wide mob rule, and now the U.S. government’s ruthless attempt to take control of the situation would be a gritty up-close view of this mayhem. The prospect of the next big shot stirred Yvette on out of her hiding place and into the streets.
The wavy haze of heat framed every detail.
Traffic signs, left in a gnarled, half-melted plight, swung in the wind. Bits of papers flew into the air like playful fireflies. The bombs’ aftermath pushed back the night as best it could. A rank stench of burning plastics, cloth, flesh, and refuse overpowered Yvette’s nose and forced her to shove a handkerchief in her face. Where seconds ago Broadway teamed with rioting mutants, it now only held grim reminders of the military’s might.
In the distance, a soft whine sounded. Set against this backdrop, the humming whine was from a life long ago, foreign but familiar. Yvette turned, and nestled beside fires and smoke were headlights. Her brain locked up, stunned someone would be alive let alone tearing through the devastation in a car.
Car. Street. Get outta the way. Outta the way!
Her brain bellowed for a response, but Yvette was too shocked. The car--a singed, deep purple Eclipse--swerved around her and skidded left onto 34th Street toward the Empire State Building.
Empire State Building! She swung the camera up and saw a laboring Magneto point. Using the zoom, she followed his line of sight to two other hovering, distraught men. They seemed determined to do something and Magneto seemed equally determined to do away with them.
Great shots. Great drama.
And the drama got even better when a small explosion lit up the seventieth floor. A mass of black in the shape of person expelled out of an already blown out window. She tried to film the descent, but no go.
Yvette lost the shot in the concrete skyline.
Then, out of the blue, a baby carrying brunette slipped out of thin air and plopped down not twenty feet away from her. If her camcorder didn’t catch the event, no one would’ve ever believed it, not even Yvette herself. Remembering the danger and possible mutants still roaming the streets, the CNN camerawoman gave the brunette a once over and bolted into another alley before she could be seen.
Hey, people popping out of nowhere had to be dangerous.
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The boom, boom, boom stopped the fight. One of the mutants storming Frost Tower spoke for everyone. “What was that?”
Spikes of ice exploded from Amanda’s hands, their trajectory, velocity, and mass controlled by Meggan. Sharpened, these weapons could turn their victims into porcupines--dead porcupines. Lucky for the wayward mutants, Meggan and Amanda weren’t in their previous, more belligerent mindset. Spikes fattened into wads of bludgeoning goodness and thundered onto the mutants like oversized balls of hail.
Crack, crack, crack, crack, thud, thud, thud, thud. They went down just as the boom, boom, boom set off every fire alarm left operational.
“He did have a point,” Amanda allowed, “What WAS that?”
“Maybe Brian and the others defeated Magneto?”
“We can only-”
“Help! Oh God, please! Help!”
The heroines watched an older, white haired woman rush through the fire escape, her face red and tears in her eyes. “Please, you have to help us upstairs!”
Being the more compassionate one, Meggan put a reassuring hand on the woman’s back and bade her to catch her breath. “Tell me the situation, please?”
The beads of sweat covered her clothes and she couldn’t get a hold of her anxiety. “One of us took a cop’s gun and has a child hostage! He says he wants to go out but we’re afraid he’ll draw the mutants here!”
“Ok,” nodded Meggan, “Come with me and I’ll sort everything out. How’s that?”
“Can... can I just stay down here?”
“No, it’s not safe here. Amanda needs all the space she can get to cast her spells. Isn’t that right, Amanda?”
“Right,” the brunette answered, trying to bolster not only the old woman’s spirits but also her own, “I’ll be fine. Take your time.”
Taking the woman’s hand, the blonde ascended to the second floor, the promise of “I’ll be back real fast!” echoing through the lobby.
“No worries,” Amanda replied as she watched another handful of troublesome mutants mill outside Frost Tower.
“No worries at all.”
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Kevin Ford, one of the students at the Xavier Institute, feared his mutation. One brush of skin on skin contact would rapidly decompose any living material, hence his codename, Wither. The Professor promised to get his power under control eventually, and while Ms. Frost had been making great progress with him, he wasn’t banking on being able to touch others any time soon. Take Rogue as an example: she’d been around the X-Men a long time, almost as long as he’d been alive and still no results. He had to give the X-Men credit for trying. An attempt to help him was more than anyone in the world gave him, including his parents.
So, Wither, Kevin Ford, continued to fear his mutation and loathed that one day, he’d turn his deadly power on those who accepted him for what he was. Someday, because fate was such an unkind bitch, he’d touch someone of the Xavier Institute and he’d be back on the streets again with no roof over his sorry head.
Someday came today.
Mr. Wagner teleported everyone. A repulsive darkness clenched his body and chilled him like death, but then it was over, and in the sickening darkness’ stead was a column of fire, the quickly approaching ground, and boom, boom, boom. A series of La Bou canopies interrupted their fall, so instead of cracking their skulls on the sidewalk after plummeting over fifteen stories, they cracked their skulls on the sidewalk after plummeting ten feet.
Only Kurt and Kevin didn’t crack their skulls on the sidewalk: they cracked their skulls on each other’s skulls. The infamous head butt headache put Kevin’s brain through the ringer, but Mr. Wagner’s piercing, bestial cries brought him back with a quickness.
The boy opened his eyes to double vision, double Stepford Cuckoos, double Sooraya, double decaying Kurt. His already thin face shriveled up on itself, his cheek bones rounded protrusions. Yellow eyes got bigger, or maybe it was the shrinking skin which made them appear bigger. Locks of hair blew away clumps at a time just as fast as the enamel wore away on his formerly sharp, pointy teeth.
“Oh.”
“My.”
“Fucking.”
“God.”
Go Stepford sisters.
Between the destructive overture and billowing flames, Kevin Ford curled himself into a tiny ball and hoped for a stray object to fall from the sky and kill him. The painful screaming wouldn’t go away; the panicked words of his peers wouldn’t stop. They asked him things but he refused to answer, a part of him hoping that they’d take their frustrations out on him.
Then, as hope dimmed with Kurt’s dimming life, a handful of X-Men--Cyclops, Jubilee, Beast, and Forge--rounded the corner. Sophie Stepford saw them first.
“Oh, oh help! Help Mr. Summers!” she waved. “Mr. Wagner’s dying!”
Mr. Summers? Kevin gripped himself tighter and wished his own powers to work on himself.
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- To be continued...
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