"Well, fuck me sideways with a rusty spoon," Wade muttered, staring at Noah's crumpled form against the wall.
But Wade didn't have time for a proper eulogy. The muscle-bound woman, who looked like she bench-pressed freight trains for fun, had just turned her attention to him, and Wade had learned long ago that when someone built like a walking tank wanted to hurt you, the best strategy was aggressive negotiation through violence.
He launched himself at her back, wrapping his arms around her throat in a textbook rear naked choke. In a normal world, against a normal opponent, this would have ended the fight in about thirty seconds.
Unfortunately, this was neither a normal world nor a normal opponent.
The woman, apparently unbothered by the minor inconvenience of having her air supply cut off, reached back, grabbed Wade's arms, and snapped them like breadsticks.
Pop. Crack.
"Well, that's not ideal," Wade observed as his healing factor began the familiar process of putting his skeleton back together. "You know, for a lady, you're surprisingly rough. I bet your dating profile gets interesting responses. 'Enjoys long walks on the beach, crushing skulls, and—'"
The woman bent forward and drove her knee into Wade's back with enough force to turn his spine into a Jackson Pollock painting.
Wade hit the concrete floor with a wet crunch that suggested several important body parts had relocated to places they didn't belong.
"Okay," Wade wheezed, blood frothing from his lips, "maybe I deserved that one."
The woman wasn't done making her point. She picked up a piece of rebar from the debris, a twisted metal rod about as thick as Wade's wrist, and drove it through his back like she was mounting a butterfly to a display board.
The rebar punched through Wade's torso, through the concrete floor beneath him, and anchored him in place like the world's most violent tent stake.
Well, Wade thought as pain exploded through his nervous system, this is suboptimal.
"Gina," Francis said, appearing from his cover and dusting off his lab coat like he'd just finished a pleasant stroll instead of surviving a gunfight. "I told you to keep them alive for questioning."
The woman, Gina, shrugged with the casual indifference of someone who'd just swatted a particularly annoying fly. "They're alive," she pointed out in a voice that sounded like gravel in a cement mixer. "You didn't specify in what condition."
Francis looked down at Wade, who was currently doing his best impression of a scarred, profanity-spouting shish kebab, then over at Noah, who looked like he'd been put through a wood chipper and reassembled by a blind person with shaky hands.
"Fair point," Francis conceded. "Status report?"
"All research materials have been destroyed," Gina reported with military efficiency. "No evidence remains. Surviving test subjects have been transferred to the Denver facility."
"Excellent. And the cleanup crew?"
"Already en route. This place will be a crater by morning."
Francis nodded with satisfaction. "Then our work here is done. Let's go."
He turned to leave, then paused and looked back at Wade with something that might have been amusement on a less sociopathic face.
"Enjoy your final moments, Mr. Wilson. I do hope you'll think of me fondly."
Wade tried to respond with his usual wit, but having a steel rod punched through your vital organs tends to limit one's conversational abilities to pained groaning and creative swearing.
Francis and Gina disappeared into the smoke, leaving behind nothing but corpses, wreckage, and two men who should have been dead but were proving frustratingly resilient.
The facility burned around them, filling the air with toxic smoke and the sound of collapsing infrastructure. Wade lay pinned to the floor, his healing factor working overtime to keep him alive while a piece of rebar performed an impromptu surgery on his internal organs.
This is it, Wade thought with surprising calm. This is how Wade Wilson dies. Not in a blaze of glory, not taking down his enemies in a final desperate charge, but skewered like a fucking hot dog at a campfire.
He thought about Vanessa, about the life he'd planned to have with her, about all the things he'd never get to say or do. The cancer would have killed him anyway, at least this way was faster.
That's when Noah stood up.
Wade's eyes went wide as he watched what should have been a very attractive corpse climb to its feet like something out of a zombie movie. Noah's chest was still caved in, his ribs were clearly broken in about seventeen places, and there was blood coming from orifices that shouldn't have blood coming from them.
But he was standing. And walking. And looking remarkably good for someone who'd just been used as a punching bag by the Incredible Hulk's angry sister.
"What in the name of Stan Lee's mustache..." Wade whispered.
Noah looked down at him with the expression of someone who'd just survived something that should have been unsurvivable and was still processing the implications.
"Hey there, gore-kebab," Noah said conversationally. "How's the whole 'being impaled' thing working out for you?"
"I've had better days," Wade admitted. "Also, I thought you were dead."
"Yeah, that's a common misconception." Noah knelt down and examined the rebar. "This is going to hurt."
"More than it already does?"
"Probably."
Noah grabbed the steel rod and yanked it out of Wade's back in one smooth motion. Wade screamed something that would have made a sailor blush, then watched in fascination as the gaping hole in his torso began to close.
"Well, I'll be damned," Wade said, prodding at his rapidly healing wound. "I'm like you. Unkillable and devastatingly handsome."
Noah looked at Wade's face, which still resembled hamburger meat that had been left on the grill too long, and decided that diplomacy was the better part of valor.
"Sure," Noah said. "Let's go with that."
Wade climbed to his feet, testing his newly repaired spine. "So what's the plan now, partner? Because I've got a girlfriend to win back, and I suspect showing up looking like I lost a fight with a cheese grater might hurt my chances."
Noah looked around at the burning facility, at the bodies scattered across the floor, at the toxic smoke pouring from every surface.
"Step one," he said, grabbing Wade's arm, "is getting out of here before this place collapses on top of us."
"And step two?"
"Step two is figuring out what the hell we do with the rest of our lives."
Noah dragged Wade toward what he hoped was an exit, running through the maze of fire and smoke with the determination of someone who'd just survived two months in hell and wasn't about to let a little structural collapse ruin his day.
They burst out of the facility like a pair of soot-covered missiles, stumbling into the cool night air and the blessed relief of oxygen that wasn't actively trying to kill them.
Behind them, the building groaned and shuddered like a dying beast, flames licking at every window and emergency klaxons wailing their electronic death song.
Noah collapsed to his knees, sucking in lungfuls of clean air and marveling at the simple pleasure of breathing without inhaling toxic fumes.
"Freedom," he gasped, looking back at the burning facility. "Actual, honest-to-god freedom."
For two months, his entire world had been that building. Every waking moment had been defined by pain, fear, and the desperate hope that someday he might see the sky again.
Now he was out, and the world stretched before him like an infinite possibility. The problem was, he had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
He was in a world that wasn't his own, with powers that defied explanation, and the only person who might understand what he was going through was a scarred mercenary with a mouth like a broken sewage pipe and approximately zero filter between his brain and his vocal cords.
This is going to be interesting, Noah thought.
He looked over at Wade, who was examining his own body with the fascination of someone discovering that physics had decided to take a coffee break.
"So," Noah said, "what now?"
"Now?" Wade grinned, and despite the horrific scarring, there was something infectious about his enthusiasm. "Now we go find Vanessa and I convince her that underneath all this beautiful scarring, I'm still the same devastatingly attractive man she fell in love with."
Noah looked Wade up and down, taking in the full extent of the damage Francis had inflicted. Wade looked like he'd been dipped in acid, put through a blender, and reassembled by someone working from a badly translated instruction manual.
"Uh, Wade?"
"Yeah?"
"You might want to put some clothes on first."
Wade looked down at himself and realized that his escape from the burning facility had cost him what remained of his already minimal wardrobe.
"Ah," Wade said with the tone of someone making a important discovery. "That would explain the draft."
Noah tried very hard not to look directly at Wade's... situation.
"Yeah," he said, staring determinedly at the horizon. "Maybe we start with finding you some pants. Then we can work on the whole 'winning back your girlfriend' thing."
"Good plan," Wade agreed. "Although I have to say, after two months in that hellhole, even being naked and horrifically disfigured feels like a step up."
Noah couldn't argue with that logic.
As they walked away from the burning facility, leaving behind the worst chapter of their lives, Noah couldn't help but wonder what other surprises this new world had in store for them.
Well, he thought, it's got to be better than Francis's idea of medical care.
Famous last words, really.
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