FREAKS

 
Author: Notmanos
E-mail: notmanos at yahoo dot com
Rating: R
Disclaimer:  The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy; the
character of Wolverine is also owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics.  No copyright
infringement intended. I'm not making any money off of this, but if you'd like to be a patron of the
arts, I won't object. ;-)  Oh, and Bob is *my* character - keep your hands off!   
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What he wanted to know was what genius thought it was a good idea to give this psycho a badge and a gun. But then Branson himself probably wasn't Mr. Stability, was he? Well, it was possible he was - mentally sound but rotten to the core. It happened, and even though he had almost no memories at all, Logan still felt like he'd seen it all before.

Hey, he wasn't all that mentally stable himself. But at least that made them almost even.

He found a bottle of Moosehead in the well stocked fridge, as well as quite a bit of food to chose from. He made himself a roast beef sandwich, thrilled to see they had brown mustard, and in honor of David's anal retentive tendencies, he made a complete fucking mess, and didn't bother to clean anything up. He left his hearing open so he could hear if David came up the drive, but he wasn't concerned either way - he wasn't going to be much of a fight.

While eating his sandwich, he walked around their frighteningly neat house and found all the guns. Mostly Glocks and Berettas - no hunting weapons here, unless it was the human variety - he collected all the ammo and the clips, and dry fired them at the floor before putting them back, just to make sure no bullets were in the chamber. The guns wouldn't be any good to David without bullets, and he didn't think he'd be rushing out to buy any more ammo at this point.

He went to the back of the house, where a sliding glass door opened on a porch now ankle deep in snow, and threw the ammunition out as far as he could. It landed somewhere in the backyard, disappearing instantly into the blanket of snow. He'd probably find it during the spring thaw, but that was assuming he was (A) alive and (B) here for it.

Logan realized he should have made two sandwiches, as he was still hungry. So when he retrieved his beer he got an apple out of the crisper, and ate it on the way back to the living room. What was it with store bought apples? They always tasted like they were made of cardboard and paste; they didn't taste anything like a real apple. Wait - when did he have a "real" apple?

Oh hell - sometimes he sounded like a cranky old man. And he wasn't old ... was he? Oh, what the fuck did it matter?

He finished off the beer, and had decided to get another one and maybe watch a bit of the boob tube when he heard car tires crunching up the gravel driveway. Lovely - hubby was home. He hoped he wasn't expecting a welcome home kiss.

Logan went to the kitchen and toss the beer bottle in a bag under the sink, where there were sacks for recycling cans and glass, and he heard David come in the door. "Alisha," he barked.

"She had to go," Logan replied, coming out of the kitchen to meet him. David was tall and sturdily built, broad shouldered with just the hint of nascent beer gut, a reasonably good looking guy with a square "Dudley Do-Right" kind of jaw and brown hair cut severely short. It was almost more of a military cut than a cop one, and made him look even more intimidating, which may have been the point. He wasn't wearing an actual uniform but a sort of faux one - black slacks, white shirt, and navy blazer all submerged beneath an authentic police issue navy parka, and he had the cap, coated in snow and rain proof plastic. He had over a foot and a hundred pounds on Alisha - she probably had no chance at all against him. "I mean, seriously, she had to book. Wouldn't you?"

David stared at him in shock, his mean little blue eyes growing even harder at the site of him, and his hand instantly fell to the bulge on his hip that could only be a holstered gun. "Who the fuck are you?"

"A friend of hers. God knows she needed one."

His eyes narrowed to slits, and his facial features hardened until it looked like he was wearing a mask made of stone. "What the fuck are you taking about? Where is she?"

"I told you - gone."

He sneered, revealing tiny, perfectly white teeth. "What the fuck are you, her boyfriend?"

Logan smiled, not quite laughing. "No, we never managed to have that proper date."

David pulled his service revolver, and slammed the door behind him. "Where is she, fuckface?"

"Now now, Constable, there's no reason for that," he said, letting his hands hang loose at his sides. He felt perfectly relaxed, perfectly at ease - and ready to spring on him any second. He was in no rush, though. He was the cat, and David, whether he knew it or not, was the tiniest mouse he had ever seen. "What exactly is Purity?"

He had been stalking menacingly towards him, gun first, but that made him pause, cocking his head to one side. He studied him like something he just found floating in his beer. "What?"

"Purity. Who are they?"

David took a long moment to process that, and Logan could almost hear the wheels in his Neanderthal brain creaking as they tried to work. He raised the gun - a Beretta .45 - and leveled it with his face. "You have until the count of three to tell me where she is, and what you're doing here. One."

Logan couldn't help but smirk. "First, tell me why you murdered Gordon Kean."

By the time David's finger tensed on the trigger, Logan was moving.

He ducked low and to the side as he launched himself forward in an open tackle, and felt the wind of the bullet pass by his head a second before his shoulder buried itself in David's midsection. He slammed him back up against the door, and David's breath left him in a big "oof" as Logan reached up, grabbed the wrist of his gun hand, and a gave it a single sharp twist.

The bones cracked like glass, and he screamed as the gun fell from his useless hand. Logan drove a knee hard into his gut, just to shut him the fuck up. As he backed off, David fell to his knees on the linoleum floor of the foyer, trying not to retch. While he coughed up bile and the protein bar he had for breakfast, Logan grabbed the Beretta, took out its ammo, and tossed the empty gun into the living room. He went back into the kitchen to dump the bullets into the sink - they rang when they hit the porcelain, like falling pennies. "You're not dealing with a woman you've beaten down for years, or a teenage boy who can barely control his powers, Constable. Do you mind if I call you Dave? You're in a shitload of trouble - I hope you realize that."

"You stupid motherfucker," David said, between coughs. He was finished throwing up, but still seemed to be struggling with the pain. "You have no idea who you're fucking with."

"Oh no, I know exactly who I'm fucking with - a murdering, wife beating prick."

He looked up at him, a glistening strand of saliva dangling from his lower lip. "I'm gonna jam your own balls down your throat before you die, you motherfucking son of a bitch."

Logan couldn't help but chuckle. "That's very creative. Also, impossible, but hey, who am I to burst your bubble?"

"You killed her 'cause of that fucking gene trash, is that it?"

For a moment, that threw him. What the fuck was the prick on about? Then he put it together. "Oh, you think I killed Alisha."

"What have you done to her?" The funny thing was, Logan knew he was furious not because he thought he hurt her, but because he took away one of his possessions. His prized toy, in fact.

"I don't think you want to know what I did to her," he admitted, smiling at his own joke and his own memories. But rather than explain that, he got back on topic. "No - unlike you, I'd never hurt her. She's gone as in gone, man - vamoosed, flown, ran off, dumped your sorry ass. Stick a fork in your shitty excuse for a marriage, 'cause it's done. And so are you."

He glared at him in pained and angry disbelief. "Lisha wouldn't leave me."

"You mean she wouldn't dare 'cause of the power you have over her? Sorry to disappoint you, but your power's gone. You're my bitch now." He was enjoying this way too much, he knew it, and yet he had no desire to stop himself. He hadn't had this much fun in ... well, ever.

David's look turned acrid, and his face flushed like he'd been windburned. No warden liked to have their prisoner taken away, and then get told it was their turn in the cell. "Are you one of his freako friends, is that it?"

"Who? Gordon's? No, I didn't know him at all. But I doubt he did anything to warrant gettin' sliced up like a pot roast and left in an alley to die. And what's with all this 'Purity" shit? What did he know about it that got him killed?"

But David was sneering at him as he struggled to his feet, trying not to aggravate his broken right wrist. "Suck my dick.I ain't tellin' you a fuckin' thing, freak. "

Logan snickered, enjoying this in the worst way possible. Boneheaded defiance! How he so loved pointless displays of macho behavior. "You're gonna tell me what I want to know, David. The only control you have over this situation is how much you're going to suffer."

As he was struggling to stand, Logan saw David's left hand fall towards his ankle, and knew what it meant. As he brought up his hand, now holding the pistol he pulled from his ankle holster, Logan was right there to rip it out of his hand and smash the side of his head into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He could have hit him harder - he could have put his head completely through the wall, cracked his skull like an eggshell, but that would be too kind to this fuck. Death was too good for him - especially if it was quick.

He sagged as if he might collapse, but he fell back against the door and managed to stay on his feet, although he looked barely conscious. Blood trickled down his face from a minor cut across his forehead, and he glared at him with glassy eyes as Logan emptied the ammo from the small gun - really just a better quality "Saturday Night special", with five shots to its name - and then threw the gun into the living room with his other useless piece. He tossed the bullets over his shoulder like a handful of spilled salt, and they hit the linoleum of the kitchen floor like dimes. "Are you startin' to get the picture here David, or do I have to break out the hand puppets?"

Farris was as stubborn as he was stupid, and launched himself at Logan. But he was slow due to his injuries, and Logan had been expecting it anyways, so he sidestepped his clumsy roundhouse and punched him hard in the stomach as David stumbled past, then gave him a hard shove to the back that sent him crashing violently to the floor. He screamed in pain as his right hand got caught between his muscular body and the linoleum, but it died in a choking sound as David coughed up some blood.

Logan had barely pulled that punch to his stomach. If he was in the ring, he'd have pulled it completely, and while he knew he was going easy on the guys, the guys would have felt it as a normal but hard punch. But he had a lot of adamantium in his fist; if he put all his strength into a punch, he could rupture any organ he desired, break any bone. He hadn't pulped David's kidney or ruptured his spleen, but he knew he'd done some damage, most likely to his stomach walls, perhaps bruised an intestine. Now that was fucking painful, and not normally lethal ... well, not right away, at any rate. "I can break every bone in your body," he told him matter of factly, with no malice. If he really  let all his hate out, he'd lose control of his temper, and the guy would be too dead to give him any answers. "In fact, I could rip your limbs off." This stupid fuck didn't know how lucky he was - he hadn't seen his claws yet. He only popped his claws when he needed to, or he decided to use them. He was very close to doing so now. "I could do what you did to that kid. Only I can make the agony last even longer."

"F-fuck you," he stammered, curling into a fetal position, arms around his stomach. There was a mere splotch of blood on the marble patterned floor, but his mouth was now bright red with it, and it streaked his chin, hiding the strands of saliva and vomit. Logan could smell fear coming off of him now, as it was finally sinking in that the "freak" in his kitchen was not Alisha, nor was he Fidget. See, they were probably good people.

Logan knew he wasn't good people.

He rather hoped he wasn't in Farris's league of slime, but if he was honest with himself, he knew he was closer to him than to either Alisha or Gordon. And that realization pissed him off so much he wanted to kick Farris around like a soccer ball just to burn off some of that self-loathing. But he couldn't kill him; he needed him to talk.

How much pain could he stand before he talked? Logan had a feeling they were both going to find that out.

The phone on the kitchen counter rang, a noise so explosively loud it almost made Logan jump out of his skin, and an inexplicable surge of fury filled him. Logan didn't want to be here; he didn't want to have to care. He didn't want have to go "easy" on this guy, just because he needed something out of him. He wanted to be on the road and forget all about this goddamn town.

And he really, really wanted to hurt this fucker. He was tired of always holding himself back.

He grabbed the phone, ripped the cord out of the wall, and flung the whole damn thing into the living room. "What the fuck is Purity?!" He roared. He was barely aware that the phone had collided with something made of glass, and shattered it as if it had been shot.

It made Farris twitch on the floor, and his fear spiked. "Kill you," he muttered, coughing up a brief spray of bloody spittle. "Kill all you fucking freaks - "

That was it. If he had any patience, it was gone. He kicked Farris over onto his back and dropped to his knees beside him, popping the claws of his left hand a millisecond before driving them deep into Farris's left shoulder. He screamed again, and his eyes were shut so tight with pain he probably hadn't even seen that the blades in his shoulder had sprung from Logan's hand. "Talk, you cocksucking piece of shit, or I'll rip your fucking arm off!"

Farris finally opened his eyes, tears of pain spilling out, and the whites had the violent red splashes of burst blood vessels. He was in a world of hurt, and since he was a fucking coward, he couldn't hold out. "It'll kill - " Farris's eyes bulged as soon as he saw the knives in him were coming straight out of Logan's fist, and he couldn't seem to tear his gaze away. "Oh my god. Oh my god - " The pungent scent of urine filled the kitchen as Farris pissed himself in abject fear.

"Talk!" He barked, twisting the blades in his shoulder just a millimeter. As he screamed, Logan pressed his fist against his right eye. "You have until the count of three. One."

"W-we're Purity," he stammered, simultaneously trying to sob and hyperventilate. Needless to say, that didn't work out too well. "We are, we - "

"We? Who? You and Branson?"

He tried to nod, but with his fist pressed hard over his eye, Farris found that impossible to do. "We have to protect the human race - "

This was some fucking human supremacist group? How fucking typical and boring. "All you cops? You're all in it?"

"Me, Sinclair, Nelson, Chief Branson."

"So why did you kill Gordon?" It still didn't make sense. Fidget was on the run from something somewhere else. It was possible bad fortune led him here and now, but he doubted it.

"H-he told us we had to."

"He?"

"Chief Branson." Tears of pain were streaming constantly from his eyes now, down the side of his face, and it felt slimy on Logan's knuckles. But as much as it disgusted him, he didn't move his fist from his eye.

Something still wasn't tracking, He had to swallow back his rage to think clearly, but still he felt completely at sea. What didn't make sense here? "Why?"

"He was a freak, a fucking freak - "

"You tortured him." He twisted the claws in his shoulder again, just another millimeter, and Farris's whole body seemed to spasm in pain as he screamed this time. The pool of blood beneath him on the floor was starting to grow exponentially now, and he wondered how much of Alisha's blood had ever been spilled on this floor. "You wanted something from him. What did you want?"

Farris was trembling now, involuntary muscle contractions from the pain, and Logan could smell his slow drift towards shock. "N-names. Wanted names."

"Whose names?"

"People he told."

Okay, now he knew he was missing something here. "People he told about what?"

"Us."

"That makes no fucking sense. You even signed your work!" He was thinking of the little graffiti tag on the wall.

"It's something ... all of us, a plan ..."

"A plan? What plan?" Farris was losing consciousness on him; his eye ( the only one he could see ) was glazing over, as if turning to ice in the socket. He ripped the claw out, and that new pain seemed to bring him back with a jolt.

"I don't know. He didn't tell me, I didn't understand ... don't kill me, I don't know what's going on."

"If you don't know what's going on, why kill him?"

He was fading away again. Pussy - he hadn't lost that much blood; he knew he hadn't punctured an artery. "Freak, dirty goddamn freak ... "

He could have been referring to him - and probably was - but Logan figured that was also his answer: he killed Fidget because he was a freak. He didn't have to know why he was killing him - he only had to know he was a mutant. That was enough. Logan, who still hadn't retracted his claws, sat back on his haunches, and drove the claws down into his right knee.

Farris was too hoarse to scream properly, so he just squeaked. "After you get through your year of physical therapy, maybe you'll be able to beat up a woman or a kid again, but the limp'll slow you down," Logan snarled, withdrawing the claw from his shattered kneecap. He wanted to kill this fuck; he really, really did. He was a stupid animal, hardly a human being at all -

( Why did that sound familiar? )

- and didn't deserve to keep sucking air. He retracted his claws and grabbed him hard by the chin, forcing the semi-conscious Farris to look at him. He knew if he changed the angle just a bit, he could snap his neck; a short, sharp death. Logan's fingers dug hard into his flesh, he could feel the bones of his lantern jaw starting to give, and he knew it would be so easy to kill this fuck. And it wasn't like he'd ever be connected to the murder, because Logan had a feeling he really didn't exist - only to the people who cut him open and played with his internal organs like pinballs. Otherwise he was a no one, a nobody, a nowhere man - and he couldn't be tied to the scene of any crime.

"What names?" Logan demanded angrily. "What names did Gordon give you?"

Farris was choking slightly, sobbing, trying not to scream, unable to do so because of the death grip Logan had on his jaw. "N-none. He didn't tell anyone .... he didn't know who to tell. He had nothing ..."

He wondered how long they tortured Fidget before they finally decided he was probably telling the truth. Just the thought of the word torture left a very bad taste in his mouth. "I did kill her, you stupid shit," he snarled down into his face. "I tore her up and left her body for the wolves. I should do that to you, but I want you to live. I want you to live, and to suffer, and to know I can take away anything from you at any time. I'll be watching -  you even look at anyone funny, and I'll be waiting to snap your spine and rip your fucking guts out. Do you understand me?"

Farris tried to nod, and Logan figured that was good enough - he couldn't stand the reek of his fear anymore. He slammed his head back hard into the floor, knocking him out.

Logan stood and quickly moved away from him, so enraged he was shaking. He wanted to kill him; he wanted to rip him to pieces, just like he had said he had done to Alisha.

He had to say that - Farris would never bother to look for a dead woman, and he knew he believed him. After all, he was a mutant freak, right? They did things like that.

With a roar of anger he could no longer suppress, Logan put his foot through their mahogany coffee table, reducing it to kindling. He had to get his anger out somehow, and if he couldn't kill that fuck, he was going to take it out on something else.

It was all a blur, honestly, just a blind surge of rage, but within minutes it looked like the formerly show room perfect living room of the Farris home had become a war zone. The mantel above the fireplace had been torn down, and was missing several bricks as well, most of which were pulverized granules on the pale blue carpet; holes had been punched and kicked in the walls, varying in size from cannonball to mortar; all pictures that had been hanging up were shards now, suggestions of objects as opposed to actual things; the t.v. was little more than a shattered casing, the glass having almost exploded on first impact, as if something inside it had been desperate to escape all along; all furniture, save for the couch, had been reduced to shapeless wrecks, stuffing spilling out like intestines.

He came back to himself ankle deep in detritus, breathing hard and smelling his own blood - he cut himself on something. His hands were bloody, but they weren't even warm from the healing process; the cuts had healed long before now.

And he thought Farris was a nutcase? Shit, did he have a right to talk? He just destroyed a room, and for what? Because he couldn't kill that guy? Why couldn't he kill David motherfucking Farris?

Logan looked down at him, still laying flat out on the kitchen floor, in a small but growing pool of blood cut with piss. In spite of his size, he looked weak and worthless, a small man who got far too drunk on his own sense of power. And what was he now?

His wife was gone. His career was pretty well over - that knee would never be right again. He might get his fat ass posted in a desk job, but somehow he didn't think Farris would last long in such a position. And worst of all, he'd talked, and got his ass kicked by a freak.

Although he hated the man, and would have gladly killed him if he tried anything now or even looked at him funny, he wasn't conscious and couldn't even twitch. Right now he seemed like an easy kill, and not even worth his scorn.

He left, pretty sure he was feeling sickened by Farris and not by his own actions, and tried to put together what he knew. Okay, so Purity was just another human supremacist organization, and Farris had been one of its idiot foot soldiers, along with about half the police force in this town. But what could Fidget know about some plan of theirs - a plan the foot soldiers had been out of the loop on - when he just got into town? And he wasn't trying to run from this town alone, he was trying to get as far from civilization as he could. If he just moved on to the next stop over the pass, he'd still be in one of those little burgs within the Whitewater police jurisdiction.

Logan had left his truck parked just down the road from the Branson place, so he got in the four wheel drive that Farris had come home in, not actually caring that it was police issue, or that he didn't have the keys - he didn't need the keys.

Once inside the four by four - and once he grew accustomed to the lingering stench of that awful hair product Farris used - he tried to guess the missing piece of this puzzle himself. Fidget was most likely running from "Purity" or something like it, but not the branch here; he'd have been far more desperate to escape and heavily armed if he knew they were here. So he was on the run from them or an affiliate in ... Calgary?

The card he pulled from the book had a Calgary phone number - his mother lived at a Calgary address. That made sense, didn't it? And taking the actual open part of the highway led back towards there. So it was something he learned in Calgary that he was running from, only they nailed him here.

What could he have learned? What was Purity so afraid of getting leaked out before they were ready for it?

There was only one man he could ask, wasn't there? Branson, the man with the plan.

As Logan started the truck, he wondered what exactly a man had to do to get arrested in this town.


 

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