X-Men(tm) The Last Stand Read online

  “Illness?” Lensherr said, so quietly that both John and Xavier got the message. The one bridled while the other raised an eyebrow in what he hoped was a subtle but unmistakable warning.

  Sensing the spike in tension, Elaine hurriedly intervened: “Now, John!”

  “You think your daughter is sick, Mr. Grey?” Lensherr asked in that same silken tone, choosing to ignore Xavier’s caution. On cue, as if to complement his undertone, the tea tray shifted ever so slightly.

  “Erik,” Xavier said, speaking both aloud and with his thoughts, “please.”

  “Call it what you like,” John Grey continued, refusing to be cowed. “What’s been happening to Jean since Annie’s death is not normal. No one can explain it—not medical doctors, nor psychiatrists—and none of them have been able to help. All we know for sure is that she’s getting worse.”

  “Are you afraid of her?” Lensherr asked, almost as if he assumed they were.

  “She’s my daughter,” John flared, “I want to help her.”

  “As do we,” Xavier interjected, playing his usual role as peacemaker, biting back the flash of irritation he felt whenever Erik let his growing antipathy towards baseline humans get the better of him. “The whole point of our school is to help people like your daughter. Perhaps,” he suggested gently, “it might be better for us to talk to her. Alone.”

  Clearly, John Grey had doubts. Only his obvious love and concern for his child kept him from showing his two guests the door. Elaine, equally concerned, a tad more desperate, didn’t give him the chance.

  “Of course.” She stepped out into the hallway. “Jean,” she called, “can you come down a moment, dear?”

  Jean was taller than when Annie died, but still lean and rangy despite the first curves of womanhood. Her hair was a dark red, like a fire seen in the heart of the deepest forest, where the flames are mostly hidden by trees and shadow. Her beauty was self-evident; by the time she was full-grown, it would be breathtaking, with the foundation of bone structure that guaranteed it would only improve with age.

  “We’ll leave you, then,” John Grey told them.

  Jean sat on the couch opposite the two men, her demeanor as polite as it was guarded. She’d decided on the way down to let them make the first move.

  Xavier obliged her.

  “It’s very rude, you know…,” he said—but his lips didn’t move.

  Her breath went out of her all in a huff. It never occurred to her that he could do what she did.

  “…to read my thoughts, or Mr. Lensherr’s, without our permission.”

  He was sending her more than words; there was a vast and complex texture to their communication that told her she’d been busted from the first fleeting telepathic contact as they drove down the street. While she’d been spying on them, Xavier was taking her full measure as a psi, without her being the slightest bit aware of it.

  Lensherr picked up the conversation from there—only he spoke aloud, suggesting to Jean that his abilities differed markedly from Xavier’s. “Did you think you were the only one of your kind, girl?”

  She intended to keep her response to herself, and bridled ever so slightly when Xavier “heard” it anyway. What kind is that? she thought.

  “We are mutants, Jean,” Xavier said. “We are like you.”

  She felt a flicker of irritation, like the striking of a match within her soul, heralding a flash of temper that was coming more and more often lately, more and more intense, no matter how hard she tried to keep it under control.

  She smiled in a way that promised trouble, a warning.

  “Really?” The thoughts and emotions that accompanied that single word were raw and rude. “I doubt that.”

  Xavier reacted first, to a volley of psychic alarms, Lensherr following his gaze to look out the study window towards the street.

  Mr. Pash was running headlong down the length of his front yard, partly dragged by his lawn mower, partly chasing frantically after it, as the old machine launched itself skyward as if it were wearing blue tights and a cape and was bent on leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

  At the same time, the stream of water from Mr. Lee’s hose decided to rebel against the reign of gravity and see what it was like to pour up instead of down. From him, Xavier and Jean heard a muttered expletive, while Pash’s initial frisson of startlement gave way to a bark of incredulous laughter.

  Then the laughter faded as he caught sight of what else was floating. All along the street, every car in view had suddenly levitated more than ten feet into the air. Nothing else had changed; it was as though they’d been lifted on invisible platforms.

  All told, better than ten tons of metal hung suspended, yet Jean wasn’t even straining.

  Lensherr couldn’t help a smile, nor a comment. “Oh, Charles, I like this one.”

  Xavier wasn’t amused. “You have more power than you can imagine, Jean.”

  Her thought, instinctive, defiant. I dunno, I can imagine quite a lot.

  She met his gaze.

  “The question is,” he continued, refusing to rise to her unspoken challenge, “will you control that power…”

  She lost focus, just like that, and the cars crashed at once to the street. She kept her eyes locked on his, real izing that somehow he’d slipped into her mind and blocked the connections between desire and response. She understood immediately how this had happened; with no one but herself possessing psychic powers, how would she have developed any defenses against another with those same abilities? She didn’t like that, hated the thought of being vulnerable; she liked even less the peremptory way he’d acted. He could have asked; sure, she was showing off, but if he’d treated her with respect she’d have listened.

  “…or let it control you?” he finished.

  She didn’t give him an answer because deep down inside, where the answer really mattered, she didn’t have one to offer, not that had any value. She suspected it was a question—a challenge—she’d hear often in the days ahead.

  She knew she’d attend his school. She’d learn from him all that he was prepared to teach—if only to be able to stand on her own two feet, free from anyone’s control.

  1995

  Father was at the bathroom door, knocking politely. Warren refused to listen.

  “Warren?” called Worthington Jr. Top tier of the Forbes 100, one of the few American billionaires who wasn’t head of a computer giant or a dot-com, one of those rarer still who’d taken the modest inheritance of his own father and built it into something of tangible and lasting value. “Son?” Pause, another knock. “Everything okay?” Another pause, another knock, voice creeping up a notch in the anxiety index. “What’s going on in here?”

  “Nothing, Dad,” called Worthington III, railing inside at the tremor in his voice. “Be right out!”

  He was twelve and had the features of an angel. Blond hair, face to die for, and a body of whipcord muscle, without a spare ounce; he was far stronger than you’d expect of a boy his age. He stood bare to the waist before the big mirror in his bathroom. In his left hand he held a boning knife, swiped from the kitchen just the other day, right after the cook had done the weekly sharpening. The blade was tungsten steel and sharper than a scalpel. There was blood on the blade, blood on the sink, blood on the floor. Warren knew he should have done this in the tub, where he could wash away all the evidence, but there was no view of the mirror from there and he had to be able to see what he was doing.

  Sweat coated his face, and he had to force himself to take deep, slow breaths in a vain attempt to calm his racing heart. His metabolism had always been hyper as far back as he could remember; he ate more at meals than most sumo wrestlers and had to struggle not to lose weight. Reactions were the same; that’s why he couldn’t play baseball anymore. Every at bat was an intentional walk, for his skill at making contact with the ball, if it was even marginally near the strike zone, was uncanny. Likewise his fielding. No matter how fast the play, for Warren everything happe
ned in slow motion. And magnificent as his reflexes were, his eyesight eclipsed them. He drove his optometrist to distraction, because there wasn’t a test that could accurately measure his vision. He never told anyone of the test he’d tried on his own, slipping onto the open air observation deck of the World Trade Center and looking out towards Kennedy Airport, a dozen miles away. With the tourist binoculars, you could make out the planes taking off. Warren, with his naked eyes, could read the serial numbers on their fuselage. Looking across the East River towards the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, he could see the details of people’s faces and clothing as they strolled—he could even read the banner headlines on their newspapers.

  But that wasn’t why he kept the visit secret. While there, he had heard a high rising screech a little below and to the side, and looked down to see a red-tailed hawk soaring effortlessly on the thermals generated by the giant HVAC fans atop the Wall Street skyscrapers, cooling the offices within while creating a perpetual heat sink a thousand feet above Manhattan’s streets. It was the most wondrous sight he’d ever seen and, without thinking, his head and upper body began to move in tandem with the hawk, as though Warren could also feel the swirls and eddies of the atmosphere. He imagined what it must be like to feel the rush of air across its wings, to plunge headlong towards oblivion, only to snap the wings wide at precisely the right second to save itself and bag the prey. To Warren Worthington III that seemed like Heaven.

  And Heaven was likely where he’d have ended up had a woman’s strong hands not caught him by the shoulders and pulled him back from the railing.

  With a start that left him speechless and trembling, he realized that he’d had one foot and both hands on the rail, and his next move would have been to climb over. Yes, it was only a modest fall to the roof below—thank God the observation platform had been set well back from the edge of the building itself—but for Warren it was the thought that counted most. Or rather, the lack of it, because he couldn’t remember much except wanting more than anything to soar with that hawk.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked, quite calmly, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time. She was taller than he was, more beautiful than any of the myriad faces that stared out from the newsstand walls of fashionista magazines, but the most striking thing about her was a mane of silver hair that fell nearly all the way down her back. She wore leather with the careless air of someone dressing for comfort, knowing that on her it would always look like couture.

  “I…I…” was the best he could stammer.

  “It’s all right to envy them,” she said, with a smile that washed over him like the sun after a spring rain, just as a cry from the access door heralded the arrival of his parents. She gave him a wink and a gentle squeeze on his arm that let him know this was their secret. “We just have to remember we don’t have wings.”

  Her words made perfect sense—and yet, there was something to the way she said them, the way she looked out across the sky towards that spiraling bird, now joined by its mate, that told him she knew far more than she was saying. He assumed she was some sort of extreme hang glider, especially with that hair.

  Except—when he and the family had reached the doorway, and he’d turned back to wave good-bye, she was gone. Quickly, he swung his eyes across the entirety of the outdoor deck, but she was nowhere to be found. As if she’d never been.

  Warren winced with pain, knew there’d be more blood, the memory banished by the tears that started unbidden from his eyes. He was crying like a baby—he couldn’t help himself. But he steeled himself against the tears, against the pain, against the fear. This had to be done.

  He scraped the blade across his back, so intent on his purpose that he completely missed the latest round of knocks on the door and the call of his father’s voice.

  “Come on, Warren,” his father said, close to the end of his patience, “it’s been an hour. Open this door.” He still wasn’t angry, although that would be soon in coming. At the moment he simply seemed concerned by his only son’s increasingly strange behavior.

  “One second,” Warren cried, trying to buy as much time as he could, unaware of how clearly his pain and tears and terror radiated through those two simple words. He moved without thinking, grabbing for his tools to stuff them into the lockbox he’d secreted in the drawer.

  Too late.

  The door burst open and in came Warren Worthington Jr., tall as his son would someday be, the fulfilled promise in maturity of the boy’s crisp beauty, yet broadly muscular in a way that Warren would never reach. Whatever emotions the father felt going in the door vanished the moment he beheld his son, standing before the mirror where Warren could see reflected what his father saw directly—a pair of ridged protrusions, as though the boy’s shoulder blades had burst upwards through the skin. Only it wasn’t those ridges that had torn the boy’s flesh. That culprit was the length of gleaming Solingen steel in his hand.

  None of that was what made Worthington Jr. gasp, and gape, in shame and horror and disbelief, his mind suddenly flooded with rage at the hand God had dealt him, not directly but through this child he loved more than his life. The objects of those emotions were scattered on the sink and floor, and some still protruded from Warren’s back, where the blade had missed them, or the boy hadn’t quite been able to reach.

  Worthington Jr. took a step forward. Without his glasses, the scene wasn’t quite as crisp as he wanted it, the objects on the sink and floor just out of focus enough to require a closer look. Warren misinterpreted the action—small wonder given the expression of horror and disgust on his father’s face—and tumbled himself into the corner, hands held up before him as though he expected to be hit. That alone was enough to break the father’s heart…

  …but he couldn’t bring himself to touch his boy, even though his pain and misery were palpable.

  Instead, he reached for the objects that had been cut from Warren’s back, refusing to accept what his eyes reported until he had them in his hand.

  Feathers.

  “No,” the father breathed, in denial.

  His son was sprouting feathers.

  “Please God, no!”

  His son, God help him, was growing wings!

  “Not you, Warren. Not…this.”

  And there were tears on Worthington’s face now, to match those on his son’s. One in a corner, the other on his knees, both in desperate need of comfort, neither with any to offer.

  2000

  Five years hadn’t changed the father much. He wasn’t quite as rich as he’d been before, but that was because he’d divested a fairly significant portion of his holdings and personal fortune to endow a number of rather esoteric research establishments across the world. He was still handsome, he was still charming—but that day in his son’s bathroom had left its mark in more ways than one. There was a haunted quality to his eyes that told of a commitment to a cause.

  “You asked me to come to Bangalore, Dr. Rao. I’m here. What do you have to show me?”

  In terms of size, this was a modest laboratory, a small part of an industrial estate that was accommodating India’s burgeoning software industry. The reason for placing it here was mainly to have access to dependable power and state-of-the-art computing facilities, not to mention the geeks to tweak the systems. Kavita Rao was both an MD and a geneticist, rated on a par with Moira MacTaggart of Edinburgh University and considered just as likely to someday claim a Nobel for medicine. The team she’d gathered in Worthington’s name was nearly on a par with her, and the clinic she’d built with his money was worthy of them all.

  One wall consisted of nothing but a giant flat-screen display, which would have cost a decent fortune in and of itself but for the fact that another company in the park specialized in making them. One meeting between Kavita and their managing director, the promise of medical care for their employees, and with that quid pro quo goods and services were speedily and regularly exchanged.

  What Worthington Jr. saw on the displa
y was a succession of double helices, which he knew were representations of someone’s DNA, the genetic building blocks of life. He hadn’t a clue what they meant, despite voluminous reading over the past half decade.

  Kavita indicated a rail-thin boy, far younger than Worthington expected, lying in an isolation room. The room had been decorated with an eye to the boy’s comfort and peace of mind—it was as much a boy’s space as it could be given the circumstances, with games and stuffed animals sharing the venue with monitors and IV stands. He was reading a stack of comics; sensing Dr. Rao’s attention on him, he offered up a wave.

  “His name is Jimmy,” she told Worthington. “It will take some considerable time to explain, and even more to bring matters to fruition, but the initial tests look quite promising. If the fates are kind, all our work may not have been in vain.”

  “Time is of no consequence,” Worthington Jr. said, pulling up a chair beside her. “Tell me everything.”

  Now

  War zone, pure and simple.

  Officially, it was night, but the darkness only served as a backdrop for a fireworks display of incredible lethality. The setting had once been a fair-sized town, decent central business district, buildings of some substance, two to five stories tall, built to last, of brick and stone. Spreading outwards in a grid pattern, residential streets, single-family homes, everything from Arts and Crafts bungalows to modern “McMansions.” Couple of parks, one mostly green space, the other intended for kids and recreation—playgrounds, baseball diamonds, bikeways and running tracks. Schools, of course, and churches.

  All gone.

  The battle lines had surged back and forth over the town, in a manner more reminiscent of the Civil War than modern warfare, but played out with weapons that made the rifles and cannons of that bloody conflict look like toys. Not a building in the town had been left whole and hardly any of the ruins that remained were still standing. The trees had been reduced to shattered stubs, trunks and branches either blown to wicked-deadly splinters or scorched beyond recognition. The earth was so pockmarked with shell holes, the streets so choked with debris, that vehicular transit was out of the question. Moving on foot was no fun either, since the piles of rubble afforded ideal hidey-holes for snipers and ambush parties, as well as for booby traps of every shape and description.