CHAPTER 57-THE COFFINS OF STEEL
The world went black when the lid slammed shut.
Logan lay still, arms pinned, metal walls pressing like a coffin made for giants. No light - but his new night vision cut through the dark. To him, it was DAY inside the tomb. Every rivet, every seam in the steel skin was laid bare in ghostly clarity.
Then came the motion.
The floor hummed, the walls thrummed, and his stomach dropped like he was in freefall. The box was airborne.
'Flying. They're flying me somewhere.'
His ears sharpened to every shift in the air outside. Engines. Wind. Pressure changing. His whole body was a barometer, screaming altitude. He counted breaths, measured the rhythm. Minutes crawled. Then hours. Still they flew. Still he was a prisoner in his own damn steel coffin.
Time stretched until thought itself blurred. Only the cold metal and the sensation of endless sky kept him company.
Finally, after what felt like forever, the flight ended with a hard jolt. The coffin clanged down, rocking on its base. Bolts snapped. Hydraulic hiss. The lid creaked open with a mechanical shriek.
Light flooded in blinding to anyone else. To Logan it was just another hue, his eyes already slicing through it.
Figures leaned over him. White coats. Human. Scientists, not soldiers. Their hands gloved, faces blank behind glass shields.
"Subject secured. Begin analysis."
They dragged him out, shackled wrists and ankles still glowing faintly with Sentinel circuitry. He let them. No sense showing his claws yet. He needed to SEE. To KNOW.
The room was vast walls covered in alien-looking instruments, Sentinel frames looming like silent judges. And there - laid out across separate tables - Jean. Banshee. Strapped, unconscious. Wires running from skulls and chests into machines that hissed and blinked with green light.
Logan's nose twitched. Salt. Brandy. Burnt wood.
He turned.
Charles Xavier. His body limp, head strapped with a lattice of electrodes. Still unconscious.
'Chuck... they got you too!
For two days the torture of science dragged on.
Needles pierced veins, scanners hummed across bone and muscle, readings flickered across endless monitors. White-coats muttered about genetics, about "resonance spikes" and "weaponizable traits." They measured his healing. His reflexes. His scent response. Every shiver of Equalizer's gift catalogued and stored.
Logan endured in silence. His eyes open even when the others dreamed. Watching. Counting faces. Storing every voice, every smell.
Two days. No chance to strike yet. No opening. Just the cold certainty boiling inside him.
When the moment came, he'd carve this lab into ribbons.
'Patience, old man. Patience. They'll slip. And then you'll show them what happens when you put a wild animal in a cage.'