The Ultimate X-Men (26 page)

“I have another idea, too, about how
⁷
the Snowman picks his victims. Some killers go for a particular physical type—children, or women with long, straight hair—but there was nothing like that in the first three killings. Different sexes, different ages, but I do see something now they may have missed. All of them could be seen as weak or infirm in some way. The last victim was a small woman. One of the earlier ones was in a wheelchair, another an old man with a cane, and so on. For all his apparent power, he preys on the weakest...” Just then she glanced up.

“
Logan, stop!”

He slammed on the brakes, and the Jeep w^ent into a four-w
⁷
heel skid. He turned with it, powering it through a full circle. For a moment he thought they’d get to try out the roll bar, then they w
⁷
ere stopped, right in the middle of a five-way intersection. He spun his head from side to side, looking both for cross traffic and less conventional threats, “mat?”

Jean already had the door open, and had dropped to the icy pavement. “I know this. I’ve seen it before through someone else’s eyes. No, not seen; remembered, or maybe thought. That jumble of images I saw—this was one of them, not a memory, but a plan. He came this way and

the umniTf
i-m

turned.” She turned in a complete circle, looking down each road. “But which way?”

A metallic glint caught Logan’s eye, and he climbed out of the Jeep to investigate. At the far right of the intersection the metal support for a stop sign had been bent flat by some impact. “We didn’t do that.” He knelt to examine the post where it has been scraped down to shiny metal, sniffing the exposed surface. “Fresh. Done in the last hour.” He inspected a lone tire track, far enough onto the shoulder not to be lost among the hundreds of others. “It matches what I saw at the turnout.”

He stepped back to the fallen sign, popped the two outer claws on his right hand, and brought it down
hard.
Jean flinched at the sound of shearing metal, but the post sliced like butter. He tossed her a three-inch section of metal.

She looked at it, puzzled.

“Now we know something else,” he explained, pointing a claw at a smear of pale green paint. ‘ ‘We know what color his wheels are.”

Back in the car, Jean glanced down at the piece of metal resting on the dash. “Not very stylish, is it?”

“Good for us. Easier to spot. Besides, this isn’t a new car. No catalytic converter. I could smell that much back at the turnout. Look for a beater. This is getting better. Half an hour back I didn’t think we had a prayer.”

“You aren’t smiling.”

“This business is too serious for smilin’, but you’re right. Stupid mistake clipping that sign. No reason for it. Good light, not much traffic, and we weren’t right on his tail.

HOSTAGES

Stupid move with us after him, but probably useless if anyone else were doing it. You got something from him during your contact—you think he knows about us too? Him, or our invisible ‘helper’?” That part still didn’t make sense to Logan. Were they talking about one person? Two? Four? A busload? And just who was siding with who?

Jean seemed confused too. She shook her head. “Maybe, I don’t know. I keep moving the pieces around in my head, and I keep coming back to one result. It doesn’t make sense, but I think the
hostage
is the mutant.”

Logan gripped the wheel tighter. A nonmutant killer with super powers, a nonexistent hostage who was a mutant, and a mystery cast of equally nonexistent supporting characters. They were coming into a village, and Jean was looking around anxiously.

“This could be it,” she said. “Slow down.”

“I don’t see any cars the right color.”

“There,” she pointed at a directional sign, “that way.” Logan read the sign as they turned: community senior center
V*
mile. “Another guess?”

She shook her head. “Logic.”

The center was a converted school building, two stories of brick and marble blackened with age. Though the sign out front advertised a potluck lunch to have been held only a few hours before, the place was nearly deserted now. There was no sign of the green beater they were looking for.

“Go around the block,” Jean suggested.

Still no sign of the car. They were cruising slowly through a tree-lined residential street when Jean’s face went

THE IIITIIIATE ME It

ashen. “I can read them, Logan, like someone opening a door. He’s stalking his victim now!”

She directed him through several turns toward a block several streets east.

“It’s an elderly woman walking home from the potluck. I’m going to try and warn her telepathically. I only hope I don’t frighten her into inaction.” Jean’s eyes closed and she frowned with concentration. “She understands. She’s trying to get to safety, Logan, but she’s too slow! The Snowman is moving toward her!”

“She only needs ta buy us a couple seconds, darlin’.” He wrenched the wheel to the right, sliding into the empty driveway of a brick rambler, into the backyard, and straight through a picket fence. They hit a snowbank and cleared a frozen drainage ditch by at least six feet.

Logan’s head hit the roll-bar as they landed, but he hardly noticed. Ahead he could see the old woman trying to run across a stretch of park meadow, an overturned two-wheel cart abandoned behind her. And he could see the killer, the Snowman, only a few yards behind. He threw the door open and jumped out while the Jeep was still slowing.

The Snowman stopped his advance when he spotted Wolverine, but he didn’t withdraw. Instead, he reached into his belt, cross-armed, with both hands, and drew a pair of ordinary looking hunting knives.

So much for “knives of green fire,
” Logan thought. He unsheathed his claws, anticipating his strike. He thought of the gutted young woman, the terrified old lady, the three bodies from last year, and mercy was not foremost on his mind.

Logan leapt, claws out. He hit, and hit hard. His claws

flOSTAOES

raked off something invisible, millimeters from the Snowman’s skin, leaving behind streaks of green electricity.

His momentum carried him past the killer; he landed off-balance and tumbled twice before coming up in a crouch.

He spun. The killer stood his ground, sheets of green lightning dancing around his body. In the background, he could see Jean helping the woman to safety. He had to keep the Snowman’s attention distracted. Logan growled deep in his throat, and charged for another attack. He moved in close, slashing with what should have been killing strokes. They skittered off harmlessly, stirring up the lightning, which flowed up the Snowman’s arms and into his knives.

The Snowman laughed and brought down his left arm.

The thick leather of Logan’s jacket sliced like tissue paper, and he felt the knife bite deep and jam between two of his ribs. He grunted as the knife pulled free, and tried to return a blow of his own. Ineffective. The Snowman’s other knife fell. Logan tried to stop it, and the blade sliced his forearm to the bone. He staggered. Before he could recover, the first blade stabbed completely through Logan’s left thigh.

Logan fell, rolling clear of his attacker. The green fire w
^r
ent with him, burning deep in his wounds, fighting his healing factor. The effort of the struggle dropped him to his knees, near unconsciousness.

He looked up, and through his blurry vision, the Snowman seemed to be running away. Logan could hear laughing. “Did he get her?” he hissed through clenched teeth.

She’s safe,
Jean’s thoughts reached him as a note of belllike clarity in a pool of pain and confusion.
I’m going to try

the iimnATt
im

to stop him telekinetically if I can, and probe him at close range if I can’t.

“Don’t,” Logan managed to whisper. Then the screaming began again.

Logan leaned against the fender of the Jeep, trying to clear his head.

Next to him, the elderly woman was beaming at Jean, seemingly unfazed by the attack. “She’s my guardian angel,” the woman kept saying, “I saw her in a vision.”

Whatever gave comfort, Logan supposed, though right then her “guardian angel” looked like she’d been dragged through the deep end of the pool. Jean sat in the Jeep’s passenger seat, dazed and bedraggled, her hair wet with melting snow. He’d found her fallen in a snowbank and carried her back to the rig.

Jean shook her head slowly, stringy ringlets of hair tumbling over her face. Speaking telepathically, so as not to let the old woman know more than she needed to, she said,
Got to stop them, Logan. They ’11 kill again unless we can stop them.

He reached out and brushed the hair back from her eyes.
You sure you’re okay, Red? You’re talking “them” and “they” again.

She looked up, and met his eyes with a tired, but lucid, stare.
I understand now, Logan, what we’re dealing with in the Snowman. The true horror of it nearly flattened me. The killer, the hostage, the mutant, and two others, the little boy and the old woman, all in one body.

Logan raised an eyebrow.
Multiple personalities ? No ivay. Mutant isn’t personality, it’s genes. I don’t have to be the Professor to know that.

IOSTMK

I didn’t understand it at first either. But the mutant isn’t an aspect of the killer’s shattered personality; he’s the killer’s third victim.
She sighed, and wiped the moisture from her eyes.
Imagine a young mutant, his power not yet expressed, a very unusual power. He was a symbiont, capable of surviving the death of his physical body by bonding with another being at the moment of death. Now imagine he becomes the victim of a serial killer, and at the moment of his death . . .

Logan’s thoughts w
^T
ent grim.
He jumps straight into the body of his own killer.

He can’t control the host body, and his power makes him a true symbiont, not a parasite. His power “pays the rent” somehow. Maybe by making the host better at what he does. In this case, he certainly made the Snowman into a better killer, maybe a perfect one.

So, the victim, the mutant, he’s the “hostage”? He’s the one that’s been helping us?

Yes, he’s the hostage, and it makes sense that he’s the one helping us. Maybe he can control the body, but only when the host is sufficiently distracted.
She hesitated.
During a killing, for instance.

Logan just grunted.

I’m also worried,
Jean continued,
about what will happen if the symbiont draws too much attention to himself.

What do you mean ?

I mean, if you already have three personalities, what’s the big deal if another one shows up ? But if you learn that one of those personalities is an alien from outside ? He might be able to kill the boy, or wipe his personality and take his powers. We just don’t know.

Logan looked down at his shredded and bloodied

IKE ULIIHATE X-HEIl

clothes. His wounds were completely healed. The effects of the green fire had burned themselves out in a few minutes. Still, it made the Snowman one of the more formidable opponents he’d ever faced. He sighed, and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Jeep. “Ma’am,” he said to the smiling woman, who probably had no idea why the two of them had been so quiet for the last few minutes, “you head home now.” She nodded, and watched as they drove off across the park.

They had picked up one other useful piece of information: Logan had recovered soon enough to catch a glimpse of the Snowman’s vehicle as it drove away across the park, a vintage green Corvair van, ancient and spotted with rust. They were building the clues to run the Snowman down, but could they find him before he killed again, and what would they do with him when they had him?

Logan stopped at the main road and looked both ways. “I need some help, Red. Which way?”

She shook her head. “You know I can’t track him, Logan.”

“We know somebody in there is tryin’ to help you, and you’ve already been inside his mind now. Give it a try.” She closed her eyes and concentrated, teeth gritted, breath held, her face lined with the strain. This continued for thirty seconds or so. Then her eyes snapped open. She blinked. “I saw something, just a flash, it could have been another victim. I couldn’t tell anything except—it was a man walking a dog.”

Logan unfolded a map and scanned the surrounding area. A small notation caught his eye. “A dog? Like a seein’-eye dog?”

mutis

She nodded. “It would fit the killer’s pattern.” “There’s a training academy for ’em in the next town east of here, ’bout six miles.” He tossed her the map without folding it and punched the accelerator. They skidded onto the highway.

Jean threw the map in the back, and drew herself up in her seat. She was finally recovering from their battle. “We still don’t know what to do with the Snowman when we find him. My TK seems to be as useless against him as your claws, and even if we could harm him, we don’t know what it would do to the innocent mutant trapped inside his body. ’ ’ “Could be,” suggested Logan, “that he’d just jump to a new host.”

“We don’t know that. It could be he can make the transfer only once. Our best bet is to find a way to contain him and take him back to the Institute—maybe the Professor can help him.”

“Whatever,” Logan said as he skidded the Jeep around an especially sharp corner, but he remained unconvinced. While he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the symbiont setting up housekeeping in Jean’s or his body, there were worse alternatives.

They soon found the Oltion Dog Training Academy, but no sign of the killer’s van or a man walking with a dog. Logan had another idea. “That man you saw must have left here not long ago with a dog. We don’t have to find the hunter if we can track the prey.”

They left the Jeep in front of the academy while Logan attempted to pick up the trail. He’d circled only a part of the building before finding it. The nice thing about dogs