Author's note: Yep, this a fanfic based on the last fifteen seconds of the final "X-Men: Age of Apocalypse" trailer. It'll be interesting to see how this compares to what happens in the actual movie.

THE BREAKOUT

The guard convulsed as every muscle in his body simultaneously spasmed. Then he collapsed to the corridor floor. Jean was doing things to the neurons of his brain that were both painful and massively disorientating. Under those circumstances, the mind usually took refuge in unconsciousness.

A pocket in the guard's jacket unsnapped itself. Then the key-card inside wiggled itself loose and dropped to the floor.

Jean was locked in a cell, but the door had slot that allowed a tray of food to be slid to the prisoners inside. She was crouched next to it, looking out at the corridor beyond their cage.

Frowning in concentration, Jean telekineticaly picked up the card. Then she fumbled for a minute or so until she managed to swipe it through the lock of their cell-door. The door clicked and buzzed as Jean turned the exterior handle and yanked the door open.

"Did it work?" Scott asked anxiously. His entire head was covered with some kind of metal mask, and his voice was muffled. He couldn't see anything.

"I knocked the guard out and the door's open," Jean replied as she cautiously stuck her head out into the corridor. She was keeping a tight grip on Scott's hand.

Scott let out a relieved sigh. "When's the last time I told you that I love you?" he asked.

A smile briefly appeared on Jean's face, but then quickly vanished. "We're not out of here yet."

Still carefully watching both ends of the corridor, Jean guided Scott out of the cell. Then Jean checked the unconcious guard's pocket. Just before the guard collapsed, she'd taken from his memory the location of the electronic key that would unlock Scott's mask.

After a few seconds of fumbling, the mask hit the concrete floor with a dull clang.

"Okay, now let's get the hell out of here," Scott said as he carefully adjusted the fit of his glasses.

Just a day ago, the X-Men had discovered that the ancient and secretive being known as Apocalypse was interested in a secret research facility up in northern Canada... and that was how the X-Men found out about the Weapon-X project. The news that Canada - or perhaps NATO - had a secret mutant research facility came as a surprise, but not a complete shock. Other nations, including the United States, had experimented with such things before.

In any case, the events involving Apocalypse were evolving with frightening speed, and the entire team simply couldn't be sent north to investigate. So Jean and Scott were ordered to learn what they could.

The mission went wrong almost immediately. A ridiculously over-built dam at a place called Alkalai Lake was the cover for the Weapon-X facility. Jean and Scott began investigating... and immediately found themselves caught up in a running fight with dozens of Weapon-X soldiers. The fight only ended when knockout-gas was used against the two X-Men.

Jean and Scott woke up in a cell that turned out to be woefully under-designed to hold a telepath with telekinetic talents. Apparently the troopers they'd fought had been so impressed with Scott's furious optic blasts, that they hadn't even noticed Jean's more subtle powers.

Stryker and his people had drastically underestimated Jean and Scott. Perhaps that was an understandable mistake - after all the two mutants were so young. And the Weapon-X facility was used to dealing with worse.

Far worse.

The creature in the tank had once been a man, but drugs and pain - incredible pain - had taken that away from him.

All he could do was writhe in agony, held in place by electrical restraints. Something was being done to him. Something terrible. Every bone in his body seemed to be on fire. It felt like his brain was cooking in his skull.

He screamed into the face mask that was keeping him from drowning, but nobody heard.

Dr. Cornelius was scared. Despite the climate-controlled room they were in, he was sweating profusely.

"This is a bad idea," he repeated.

Colonel Stryker stubbornly shook his head. "Those two kids are a part of Xavier's outfit. We don't know how much he knows about us, but we have to assume it's too much. There could be more of them showing up any minute. We have to finish the process and move the project out of here. We aren't ready to fight them all."

Cornelius couldn't argue. After all, he'd long ago been forced to sell his soul to William Stryker. The adamantium-bonding process was being accelerated beyond all reason, but if Stryker wanted it done, then Cornelius had to see that it was done.

In the center of what was supposed to be the dam's control-room was a coffin-like tank filled with a clear fluid. It was surrounded by odd machinery. A pair of technicians clad in protective suits were managing the instruments and controls that were attached to the tank.

There was a body in the tank. Cables, hoses, and insulated wires led into the tank - and into the body of the man immersed in the tank.

"This might kill even him," Cornelius warned tiredly.

Actually, Cornelius rather hoped that would happen. He kept having nightmares reminiscent of the old Frankenstein movies - with himself in the role of Dr. Frankenstein and the man in the tank as Frankenstein's monster.

"That's a chance we have to take," Stryker said coldly, his eyes never wavering from the tank.

Cornelius sighed and rechecked his instruments.

So far, it was going better than he'd expected.

Jean and Scott were no more than a dozen yards from their cell when two technicians came around a corner. For a long and frozen moment, the escapees and the two technicians just stared at each other. But the technicians were older, more experienced, and very well-trained. They both went for their side-arms.

Scott quickly hit them with an optic blast. He was careful not to strike them directly - that might have killed both men. Instead, the blast of red energy slammed between the two technicians and grazed them both. They went flying against the walls of the corridor.

The main force of the blast slammed into the far wall, smashing through it and penetrating deep into the chambers beyond.

The entire facility seemed to shudder. Then it went dark.

The pain didn't stop - it just stopped getting worse.

The restraints were holding him in place by using a constant stream of electrical shocks keep him paralyzed, but they had gone dead.

The scene outside the tank - distorted as it was by pain and the fluids in which he was immersed - was gone, replaced with darkness.

With a violent surge, the creature exploded upwards, surfacing from the tank in a spray of fluid. Hoses, conduits, and instrument feeds were dangling from his otherwise naked upper body.

He had to get out. He had to get out right now. Anything was preferable to staying where he was.

As he climbed out, he could sense a pair of nearby targets.

They were between him and freedom.

His hands flared with pain as they seemed to split open.

"What the hell?" somebody - one of the observers, Cornelius thought - yelled. His voice raised above the general background noise.

Nobody could see a thing. There was a hubbub of questions and concern. And an alarm was blaring.

Then something warm and wet splattered across Cornelius' face.

The blackout worked to Jean and Scott's advantage. They immediately seized the opportunity and began drifting through the semi-darkness, following the emergency signs that should lead them to an exit.

They were still holding hands. Suddenly, Jean's grip on Scott's hand spasmed and her nails dug into his flesh.

Scott winced. "What's wrong?"

"I... I don't..." Jean stuttered.

Reacting by sheer instinct, Scott took Jean in his arms. She would have collapsed otherwise.

"They must have animals here," Jean said dazedly.

"What do you mean?"

"Something's gotten loose," Jean told him quietly. "Something that isn't human."

He'd gotten to the lab door, but he could tell that the hallway beyond was guarded...

If the darkness persisted, he might be able to slip past the guards.

If not, he'd kill them.

The emergency lights finally flickered on.

Dr. Cornelius immediately noticed three things.

First, Stryker was gone.

Second, the body in the tank was also gone.

Third, the two technicians who had been monitoring the tank were dead. One was sliced open from his throat to his pelvis and his insides had spilled out onto the laboratory's concrete floor. The other had been decapitated and a fine spray of blood was decorating the floor and a nearby support pillar. Two huge pools of blood were merging into one.

The head had been neatly placed on a nearby surgical table. It's eyes were open and there was an expression of unbelieving terror on its face. It seemed to be staring directly at Cornelius.

Somehow, the two men had been killed in complete silence.

Cornelius slowly touched his hand to his face. Then he looked at his fingers. They were red with blood. The analytical part of Cornelius' mind told him that he was uninjured. The blood on his face was splatter from the one of the dead technicians.

From the hallway outside the lab, gunfire erupted.

A dim version of the lights were back on. In the distance, there was the sound of gunshots. That made Scott wonder. Had the others arrived to rescue them? It was so soon...

"We have to get out of here," Jean told him tensely, her voice bright with fear.

"What's happening?" Scott asked.

Jean licked her lips nervously. "There's a fight going on between the people who built this place and... and... something else. The thing that was a prisoner here."

Scott stared at Jean for a moment. Then he carefully scanned their surroundings, looking for the next emergency exit sign.

"Look out!" Jean warned, but it was too late.

A half-dozen guards, equipped with automatic weapons and wearing some kind of full-body armor, burst out of a nearby door.

He'd almost been past the guards when the lights came back on. Everything after that was a hazy red blur.

But now he was back. And he'd been shot. Hell, he'd been shot multiple times. One thing he could clearly remember was a bullet glancing off his skull.

He should be dead, but he wasn't.

The hallway looked like a slaughter-house. The bodies of some of the guards were barely recognizable as human.

Flesh, blood, and expended cartridge cases scraped and squelched under his bare feet as he kept moving.

Cornelius had one priority. He had to get the hell out of there.

He knew that their creation - their Frankenstein's monster - was on the loose. He knew what it could do.

Fuck science. Fuck Weapon-X. Fuck those deaths that Stryker was holding over his head. And, most of all, fuck William Stryker. None of that would matter if he ended up as a meal for a bipedal killing machine, his flayed skin turned into a cape for something dark and red-eyed that crouched in the darkness and smiled with too many sharp teeth...

Cornelius shuddered. He had to get away.

There was an escape tunnel in the back of the lab. Almost nobody else knew about it. If Cornelius had to make a bet, that was how Stryker had gotten out. He'd bolted through it at the first sign of trouble.

Cornelius tried to work up some righteous contempt for Stryker, but he really couldn't. He had obviously done the smart thing. Cornelius just wished he'd been as quick on the uptake.

Jean threw up a telekinetic shield just in time. That deflected most of the bullets. Sheer luck prevented them from being hit by the remainder.

Scott blew a guard off his feet as they scrambled into an empty room. He was already coldly aware that the Professor's rule about non-lethal force was rapidly becoming non-applicable. There were too many heavily-armed opponents. Trying to be gentle would surely get them killed.

They almost had the door closed behind them when a flash-bang grenade went off on the other side. They didn't take the worst of it, but it still left them dazed.

He paused, listened intently, and then sniffed the air.

Gunfire - maybe a half-dozen weapons. There was another fight going on. Somebody else was on the run and they were cornered.

The smart thing to do was to ignore that and continue with his escape.

Yeah, that was the smart move. The survivor's move.

The animal move.

Cornelius sprinted through the escape tunnel. It would take him to the surface, not too far from the motor pool.

He'd been considering his options ever since Stryker "recruited" him for Weapon-X. He'd grab a vehicle and head southwest. Once he got to the coast, he'd steal a boat - Cornelius had grown up on the water and was actually a fairly decent sailor. He'd use the boat to skip his way down the coastline.

In the long run, there was nowhere in the civilized world where Cornelius could hide, but there were still places where law-enforcement was less stringent. And Cornelius had useful skills. There were a lot of places in the Third World that needed a doctor, and wouldn't be inclined to ask too many questions if one suddenly appeared and claimed he was a member of some international charitable group.

After he had some resources to work with, Cornelius would get a new identity. In a lot of countries, a full set of identification paperwork was available for a reasonable fee.

Their ears were still ringing from the grenade and they were having trouble hearing.

Jean and Scott were trapped in the room. There was no other way out.

The guards on the other side of the bullet-riddled door were silent for the moment. They were probably preparing for an assault.

Scott could visualize how that would work. Open the door, pitch in some grenades, duck back until the grenades detonated, then advance into the room. They would sweep the room with weapons fire. Scott and Jean were too dangerous to mess around with.

"Hold the door," Scott told Jean.

Jean nodded as she concentrated. The door became immobile, but that was a short-term solution. Eventually the guards would simple shoot the door to pieces. Or perhaps use explosives to blow it open.

The guards were up to something. Despite the problems with his hearing, Scott could make out a series of thumps and crashes from the other room.

Scott examined the walls on either side of the door, trying to remember the layout of the corridor beyond. If he could blast through the wall and catch the guards bunched up as they prepared for their assault...

"Scott..." Jean said suddenly. She was pointing at the floor.

That was when Scott saw the blood oozing out from underneath the door.

The guards never saw him coming. They were too busy concentrating on the people they had trapped.

It was all over in a few lethal seconds.

Standing in a pool of blood, he put his hand up against the shot-up door. The bitter stink of chemical explosives - a stun grenade he guessed - filled the corridor. However, he could still catch the scent of the others.

Two of them.

Male and female.

Just kids.

Cornelius was well aware of the fact that he was following Stryker's trail. He was warily keeping an eye out for the man.

It had occured to Cornelius that he would never have a better opportunity to kill William Stryker. And if Stryker were gone, that would be one less thing - a big thing - for him to worry about.

In any kind of physical confrontation, Stryker obviously would have the advantage. Cornelius' previous killings had been in the laboratory, a product of experiments gone wrong.

But Cornelius was a man of intellect and reason. Like many other things, murder was just a problem that required a good plan.

Moving forward, Jean put a hand up against the door. Panic flared in Scott's eyes as he took an urgent step towards her. If any of the guards decided to fire througn the door...

Jean held up her other hand and stopped Scott in his tracks.

There was something in Jean's eyes. She knew what she was doing.

"Hello?" Jean said softly.

There was just the door between him and the girl on the other side.

"Hello?" he heard her say.

He hesitated.

He could answer. He could open the door.

But if he did, they would see him as he was. Naked, covered with gore, with metal claws coming out of his hands, reeking of blood and death.

Standing alone, surrounded by the men he'd killed.

He suddenly realized that he didn't want anyone to see him that way.

He didn't want her to see him that way.

Cornelius came to the end of the tunnel. The exit was more like a hatch than a door. Cornelius opened it with some difficulty, since he was out of breath.

Stryker was just standing outside. He had a phone up to his ear and was talking to someone. He was trying to direct the crisis in the facility from a safe distance. Stryker's eyes flicked over to Cornelius, and then looked away. Cornelius knew that look. His presence had been noted and then curtly dismissed.

"What happened?" Scott whispered.

"The guards are all dead," Jean responded just as quietly. Her hand was still on the door and she seemed to be looking beyond it. "Whatever killed him is on the other side of the door."

Something cold slithered down Scott's spine. "What is it?"

Jean shook her head. "Remember that time at the zoo? When I tried to read that tiger's mind? It's something like that."

No.

No. He should leave.

Turning around, he began moving back down the corridor.

Maybe he was making a mistake, but he didn't want anyone to see him like this.

*Wait,* the girl's - the woman's - voice whispered in his mind.

He shook it off.

It was so easy. Stryker never really did see Cornelius as anything but a creature of the laboratory - certainly not a threat to someone as important as Colonel William Stryker. So Cornelius was able to get behind Stryker without a problem. And there was this very handy rock right at his feet...

Stryker was just so damned confidant that he was no threat. It was infuriating. It sent Cornelius into a rage that utterly surprised him.

Cornelius hated Stryker, but he had no idea how much.

By the time Cornelius came to his senses, Stryker was brutally dead. He was lying on the ground, his head pounded into a misshapen pulp. Cornelius' hands and the rock he'd used to kill Stryker were covered with gore.

He threw away the rock he'd used to kill Stryker.

His lab-coat was a mess. Cornelius stripped it off, wiped his hands and face clean with the interior, and then dropped it.

Then he ran to the motor pool.

There was a roar from above. Glancing up, Cornelius could see an aircraft descending from the sky.

Jean telepathically led their rescuers straight to them. Raven was leading the rescue team. She was obviously surprised at the carnage she found in the facility.

"You've been busy," she told Jean and Scott.

Scott just looked at Raven. "We had... some help," he said.

Jean just nodded. Her eyes were distant. She was trying to talk to someone.

*We can help you,* she "said" telepathically.

*We can help you.*

He wasn't sure how the girl was doing that. But then again, he knew the world was a much stranger place than most people realized.

He shook his head. There was no helping him. The kid meant well - and there was something inviting about the thoughts she sent his way. Something that was clean and innocent. She'd been scared of him, but now she was scared for him.

Maybe that wasn't a good idea on her part

Cornelius was on the road, heading towards civilization at a good speed. He'd snagged a set of keys from the motor pool office. They were for a civilian SUV that had a deliberately ordinary appearance and innocuous license plates.

The vehicle finally turned off the gravel road and onto a paved highway.

It was happening, Cornelius thought giddily to himself. He was free.

That was when the thing hiding in the back sat up.

"Hey, doc," came a rough rumble of a voice.