The Ultimate X-Men (2 page)

hands and knees crawl

c’mon David you have to keep moving

No one needed him to save the world. Not when others were available to do it.

“Do you ever wonder why we do it? I mean, we could have had normal lives,” the young man said pensively.

And in fact, the speaker looked normal—a slight twen-tysomething with brown hair and brown eyes and a faintly mocking smile—save for the thick coating of frost that covered his hand and turned the liquid in his glass to gelid slush.

“That’s something you’d never have to worry about, Robert m’lad,” the Beast said. He regarded his glass meditatively, tossed it up, caught it, and drank.

Bobby Drake—Iceman to his teammates and enemies— slid his free hand unobtrusively below Hank’s line of sight. At a mental command, snow began to form in his palm, created from the moisture in the air by Iceman’s mutant power: the power to create ice and project the cold needed to keep it from melting under even the most adverse conditions—like a hot August day.

“Knock it off, Bobby.”

The snow turned to water before Iceman could consciously react. Save for his heavy dark glasses, Scott Summers looked ordinary enough to be Bobby’s older brother, but as Cyclops, he had been the X-Men’s first team leader, and after so many years, the habit of obedience that had saved Bobby’s life countless times was ingrained in the younger man’s mind well below the level of conscious thought.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Bobby protested, more out of habit than any hope of getting away with it.

“Yet,” the fifth member of the party finished for him.

Tilt IHTIIUTf X-HEH

Cool and eye-catching in white tennis shorts and sleeveless turdeneck, Jean Grey was a regal redhead, with a model’s poise and flawless skin. Both a telepath and telekinetic, she Was also now married to Scott Summers.

“Bobby, when are you ever going to grow up?” she asked with an amused, long-suffering sigh.

“When somebody makes him,” Archangel drawled in his silver-spoon accent. The sunlight threw flickers of light off the silvery metal of his wings. “And I think I just might—
What was that?”

All of them had heard it. A short, sharp, odd sound, brief and loud.

Archangel turned in the direction the sound had come from, his wings mantling for flight. “Maybe I’d better—” he began.

“It was probably just somebody’s arugula steamer misfiring,” the Beast said lighdy. “Warren, old friend, you really should—”

“I’ll just go check it out,” Archangel said quickly. Stepping away from the others, he spread his wings to their full span, and, with one powerful downbeat, Archangel was airborne.

Hank sat up a little straighter in his chair and regarded the others quizzically from beneath furry beetling brows.

“Did it ever occur to anyone that we may be a wee bit too hasty in borrowing trouble?” he asked.

“There’s never any need to borrow trouble,” Scott Summers answered grimly. “They give enough of it away free.”

“Besides,” Bobby Drake quipped, “what else do we know how to do?”

* * *

The running man crawled now. He didn’t know what else to do. He was already half delirious with exhaustion; the image of a long-ago Indiana summer came to him, of a day on which any heroic dreams he’d had were quenched forever. He’d been eight years old, and his dog had died. . . .

The flashback came easily, pulling him back into the past when he knew that what he had to do was to get up, to
run,
even though there was nowhere to run to. Even if he Spun himself into one of those other worlds whose ever-shifting reality he could sense, Black Team 51 might be waiting for him in almost any of them, and he wouldn’t know they were there until it was too late.

Grimly, David Ferris forced his body forward, though the movie in his mind played on unchecked. He thought about little else, now, but that moment when his life had undergone an irrevocable . . . mutation.

It was August, and so it tuas hot. . . .

Penrod High School was a racially homogenous blue-collar Indiana high school, proud of its football team and with no more in the way of alcohol, drugs, firearms, and teen pregnancies than plagued most American schools these days. PFIS was an old building, dating from the early 1940s. Later architects could have told its designers of the unwisdom of putting such a tempting ledge outside the fourth-floor windows. Just six inches wide, purely ornamental.

Snow days had made the school year run all the way into July, and the start of summer school had been correspondingly delayed. It was twelve-thirty. Lunchtime. And David, who was teaching English Comp in summer session, had been heading for his car, thinking of nothing more exotic

ME UlTIHATf x-ntn

than the local Pizza Hut cuisine, when he heard a girl’s shrill scream behind him.

He turned and looked, then looked where she was looking.

Up.

From inside the classroom the ledge looked wide enough to walk on. Until class cutup Martin Mathers actually got out onto the ledge, away from the refuge of the classroom window, and looked
down
—

David Ferris needed only a moment to take in the situation; he could already hear the distant wail of the fire engines coming to the rescue. They’d be here in a few minutes, only Martin didn’t have those few minutes. Already David could see him teetering at the edge of the ledge.

You can save him.

Was it some perfidious serpent that w
^r
hispered those wwds in the depths of David Ferris’s mind, some lingering ambition to be a hero? Perhaps if David had dreamed bigger dreams, he would have had the skill and control when it mattered. Or maybe the tragedy had been foreordained from the moment that the baby Spun apple juice to orange juice in its bottle.

I can save him.

Was it some primal hatred of
homo superior
for
homo sapiens
? Was it the need to justify his existence to a world that saw his kind only as a threat? For two decades he’d been careful to hide his mutant power, until now. Until once again the stakes had been life . . . and death.

Was it an act of heroism? Or genocide?

ifi

in A WONDERFUL LIEE

No one would ever know. The only thing that was certain, on that bright summer day, was that David Ferris reached into the shadows of possibility to Spin a safer refuge for Martin Mathers—a ledge that was wider, a world in which the boy had never gone out the window at all—

And missed.

Because in all the myriad worlds of possibility, David had forgotten that there was one in which no ledge existed at all. . . .

Archangel lunged skyward with powerful beats of his deadly silver wings. Like some fearsome bird of prey, he instinctively sought the air currents that would pull him higher into the sky.
Hank was probably right,
Warren mused, catching a thermal that swept him a dozen yards higher in seconds. He felt the corresponding pull in the muscles of his back as his wings spread and cupped the rising air. Almost absently, his eyes searched the ground below for the source of the sound, picking out with ease the flagstoned terrace of Professor Xavier’s school and the four figures still seated there.
It probably
was
an arngula steamer misfiring. Not a job for the X-Men.

It was just that Archangel couldn’t resist any excuse— even a lame one—for taking to the air. The others just didn’t understand. Couldn’t. None of the earthbound could understand the glory of unaided flight.

Warren’s train of thought abruptly broke off and he smiled wryly. Old habits died hard; in his teen years as a student at the school, such thoughtless musings would have earned him a severe rebuke from the X-Men’s mentor and taskmaster, Professor Charles Xavier. From the very first,

THE UtTIHATE X-HEtl

Xavier had insisted that his X-Men think of themselves as
human
, not
homo superior,
as Magneto and some other would-be mutant messiahs would have it. Human. Not better. Only different.

But some differences were basic—as fundamental as the difference between walking . . . and flying. His fellow X-Men didn’t really understand that their teammate’s need to fly was as basic as theirs to walk. Archangel banked, spreading his wings wider and gliding in a slow spiral. His overflight of Salem Center and its surroundings wouldn’t compromise site security; he was high enough up that anyone watching from below would probably take him for a kite or a plane. He’d stay up here long enough to be able to say he’d checked out the area and then go back. It was the least he could do, considering that his reconnaissance was really only an excuse for a little harmless exercise.

Then Warren looked down at the ground below, and what he saw
^r
made him fling his wings forward, spilling the wind through his pinions and bringing his body to a shuddering halt in the warm summer air.

The Indianapolis police kept him for endless hours before deciding that they could not prove responsibility in Martin Mathers’ death; could not prove that he had actually been involved; could not even prove what everyone at the school now knew to be the truth . . .

David Ferris was one of
them.

He came home to an apartment that had been violated, the furniture destroyed, the walls painted with slogans that had used to be familiar only from the evening news.
Die

n

in A WOfiDERflll lift

Mutie Scum
—
genejoke
—read the letters in dripping paint, and in that moment David knew that his life was over.

But his dying had hardly begun.

This is it. I’m through.
He’d finally managed to stand, clutching at a tree trunk for support, but he knew that forcing his exhausted body to run was beyond all possibility. And the part of David Ferris that wanted to pay for his crimes—
rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft
—welcomed the hunters who followed him so relentlessly.

Black Team 51. Their names were Gilman and Egan, and they’d come into his life a little over a week ago, while he was still staring helplessly at the wreckage of his apartment. They’d told him their names, but they hadn’t told him anything else. Except the most important thing.

“There’s a man who’cl like to meet you. He wants you to work for him. You’re special, David. He’s interested in your special abilities. And face it, after yesterday how many choices do you have?”

Come with us, and Spin dross into gold, into fire, into blood . . . And all across the Multiverse, a thousand David Ferrises refused and died.

But David Ferris knew more about choices than any other man alive. He’d played along, played for time, and when they’d let their guard down he’d given Egan and Gilman the slip and fled to New York—hoping to get out of the country—only to find that Black Team 51 had second-guessed him, just as they had at each step down the line. They’d been waiting at the airport.

He’d panicked and run, hitchhiked, anything to find a reality that didn’t place him in the back seat of that black sedan. And for a few hours he’d thought he’d won, but

Itlf ULTIMATE MIEH

every time he reached the road it seemed the car found him again within minutes. Content to follow, playing some sadistic game of cat and mouse, waiting for the moment when David Ferris could run no longer.

Waiting for this moment.

W
^?
hy were they so cautious? Were they expecting him to fight back? David smiled without any particular humor. It was true that they didn’t know what he was capable of, but the real joke was:
he
didn’t know what he was capable of. And it didn’t look like he was going to live long enough to find out either.

There was a sound of tires on gravel on the road behind him. David turned on unsteady legs to face it. The black sedan’s side windows were tinted, and the windshield was some sort of one-way glass. The car might be full of Martians, for all David could see, but in some universes the windows weren’t tinted, and he knew it was Egan and Gilman. Who were through playing. David heard a faint hum as the powered side window rolled down and some monstrous and evil machine of chrome tubes, flashing lights, and wicked flanges poked out.

It looked as if it had been dropped here from some alternate reality, like something out of a
Star Wars
movie, something that could not possibly function. David stared at it in disbelief. As it sighted on him a thin keening grew louder, sliding out of audibility until it was only an ultrasonic pressure against his skin. And in a moment of despairing clarity, David Ferris realized that he did not want to die, that he would do anything to stay alive—and free.

He’d even do what they wanted him to do.

The Wheel that hovered at the edge of his consciousness

n

every waking moment came sharp. David reached for it, Spun it into manifestation with the last of his mutant stamina, braiding all the possible realities together as the power surged through him into the woi'ld. His body cracked like a whip as living flesh completed the circuit, and David Ferris reached out from What Was to What Could Be—

And in the blink of an eye, Could Be became Was.

The summer sunlight went flatly yellow, and the stench of burning sulphur seemed to hang on the air. Beneath the wheels of the black sedan, the asphalt pulled and turned to tar and stretched like hot taffy. . .

Until it burst.

Ropy tentacles the color of rotting eggplant slithered through the tarry chunks of broken road, writhing themselves around the car, tightening and beginning to
pull.
The hood gave a sharp
ping!
as it buckled, and under the unrelenting pressure the tinted windows crazed, then shattered, then spilled over the doors of the car like dangerous candy.

Someone screamed. The weapon in the car slewed crazily about, then fired, and for a brief instant David Ferris’s body was outlined in a corona of multicolored light.