The Ultimate X-Men Read online

  Stan Lee

  Editor

  BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY INC. NEW YORK

  BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

  (OIIflTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Stan Lee

  Illustration by Joe St. Pierre

  IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE ^ $****■>'&***>

  eluki bes shahar Illustration by Tom Grummett

  GIFT OF THE SILVER FOX

  Ashley McConnell Illustration by Gary Frank

  STILLBORN IN THE MIST^*'6*'1

  Dean Wesley Smith Illustration by Ralph Reese

  X-PRESSO

  Ken Grobe

  Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg

  FOUR ANGRY MUTANTS

  Andy Lane & Rebecca Levene Illustration by Brent Anderson

  ON THE AIR .

  Glenn Hauman Illustration by Ron Lim

  SUMMER BREEZE

  Jenn Saint-John & Tammy Lynne Dunn Illustration by James W. Fry

  (OITtHTS

  LIFE IS BUT A DREAM 205

  Stan Timmons

  Illustration by Rick Leonardi & Terry Austin

  225

  Evan Skolnick

  Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg

  HOSTAGES

  J. Steven York Illustration by Ralph Reese

  OUT OF PLACE 287

  Dave Smeds

  Illustration by Brent Anderson

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES 309

  iimuaion

  Stan Lee

  Illustration by Joe St. Pierre

  in A WONDERFUL LlfE

  eluki lies shahar

  Illustration by Tom Grummett

  roily miles north of New York City in the northernmost tip of Westchester County lies the small town of Salem Center, New York. Here vast tracts of gently wooded greensward cradle the sprawling estates; they are still mostly private houses, though one of the stately homes that once boasted a secret dock for smuggling Prohibition-era booze and still can claim an unrivaled view of the Hudson River has become a five-star restaurant, and another is now a thriving bed-and-breakfast. The town of Salem Center is the kind of place that driven Manhattan professionals like to escape to: surrounded by riding academies and private schools, all the grace notes of a life of wealth and privilege, it. is a community that values privacy, where secrets are jealously guarded.

  Although some secrets are bigger than others.

  On Greymalkin Lane the houses are set far back from the road. Their existence is proclaimed only by the pillars flanking the iron gates of the widely spaced driveways. On one gate in particular, as if identification of what lies within is particularly important, there is a small brass plaque: ‘‘The Xavier Institute of Higher Learning.”

  Once I had a normal life. The running man clung to that thought as if it were a place he could go to hide. He’d had a normal life, a quiet life, a life where men with guns didn’t come to his door, and then—and then—

  His foot hit an exposed tree root and he was knocked sprawling. He lay facedown, sucking the wet-earth-scented air into burning lungs and wondering where he was. His last ride had dropped him north of New York City somewhere; he’d thought it was safe enough to hitch again. The

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  running man had never heard of Professor Charles Xavier or his school, although he’d certainly heard of the X-Men. He had no idea that he was less than a mile from possibly the only people on earth who could help him. The running man had given up hope of help long ago.

  He’d been standing at the edge of the road when he saw the black sedan with the government plates cruise past him In the southbound lane and then pull into the “Official Vehicles Only” turnaround. He’d taken off cross-country; when the landscape opened out into woods and fields, he was sure he’d lost them.

  His breath rasped in and out of his lungs with a desperate gasping sound as he lay there. His throat felt as if he’d swallowed dry ice. Thoughts spun through his mind like angry hornets.

  Have to get up.

  Almost finished.

  Get up, dammit!

  But he couldn’t. He could only lie there. A matter of minutes now and Black Team 51 would have him.

  If only he could be sure they’d kill him.

  But they wouldn’t. That was the special hell of it. They wanted him to work for them. And he was afraid, afraid of what they would make him do. . . .

  Once upon a time, the running man had possessed a name. He’d been David Ferris; twenty-nine, unmarried, and—according to his now ex-girlfriend Alicia—looked a lot like Fox Mulder on The X-Files. Until a week ago he’d been just another teacher at Penrod High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, brass buckle of the Corn Belt.

  A normal life. Once he’d had a normal life.

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  * * *

  It was August, and so it was hot, and the four men and one woman could easily have sought the sanctuary of the air-conditioning inside the sprawling mansion—or even the pool on the other side of the house. Instead they sat in a casual grouping upon the shady flagstoned terrace at the back of the house, concealed from accidental view with a caution that had become habit long since. The only sound on the hot summer air was the rattle of ice in the tall lemonade glasses and the desultory sound of relaxed talk among them. These five had passed through Life and Death together, and the most important things they could express to one another had already been said long ago.

  They were all in their twenties, all at that peak of health and conditioning that marks the professional athlete, whose success or failure depends entirely on the educated body’s response to the demanding mind. But these five were not professional athletes, though one of them, at least, had arrived at that peak of fame and adulation that only sports stars and rock stars—and super heroes—know.

  Once he’d stood with the Avengers, Earth’s mightiest heroes, in the days when there were no East or West Coast Avengers, no first or second team. But before that his allegiance had been to another assemblage, in the days now long past when that supergroup’s roster could be counted on the digits of one hand: in that twilight moment between their discovery that they were different from the rest of humanity, and the moment the world learned to hate and fear them.

  His name was Henry P. McCoy, and he was the X-Man known as the Beast.

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  Of the five heroes gathered on that shady secluded terrace, Hank McCoy looked least human, though all five of them had been able to pass for human once—had in fact passed for human during one of those dark periods when the X-Men were driven underground by a prejudice so deep that even some of their fellow heroes turned against them, and Hank McCoy had left them to pursue his first love, biochemistry research. There, youthful pride and an experiment gone wrong had trapped him forever in a shape as bestial as his code name—the form of a burly blue-furred monster with long, gleaming fangs. Since his transformation Hank stood upright only with the greatest of effort, though he could bound along on his knuckles and toes faster than a racehorse could run.

  At the moment Hank McCoy reclined in a specially reinforced lawn chair, the dark glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose adding a note of absurdity to his broad inhuman countenance. He perched his slippery tumbler of lemonade on the tip of one taloned finger and studied it meditatively.

  “I hate to mention this, Warren m’boy, but you’re interfering with my tan,” Hank said.

  Behind the Beast stood his teammate, bio-mechanical wings spread to block the sun. When Hank spoke, he spread them wider, then turned aside so that his shadow no longer fell upon the Beast’s blue-furred body.

  “Oh, well, excuse moi,” Archangel said with a grin, making a big show of getting out of his teammate’s light.
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br />   Born Warren Worthington III, he had called himself the Avenging Angel when Professor Charles Xavier invited him to join the X-Men—and convinced him to shorten his name to simply Angel. But the man now called Archangel had drifted nearly as far from human as Hank had. Once great white-feathered wings had sprouted from his shoulder blades when the hormonal changes of puberty had brought his mutant gifts to flower—though those were gone now, irrevocably damaged in battle and amputated. In their place Archangel now bore glittering metal wings, as intricately feathered as his natural ones had been, and so bound into his nervous system that he could launch their razor-feather darts at will. The same dubious benefactor who had engineered this transformation had also turned Warren’s skin a cyanotic blue: stronger and tougher than ordinary human— or even mutant—skin, it provided a great advantage to Archangel in battle; at the same time it irrevocably marked him out from the rest of humanity. Different. Alien.

  David Ferris had always known he was different— get up you have to get up —but when he’d been a child a quarter of a century ago the world had been different, too—

  get up it isn’t that hard they’ll be here soon —the superteams and lone costumed avengers that were so much a part of modern daily life now— you can’t let them take you —were a thing of the future, or dim past-era memories in the minds of those who had fought beside the more-than-human in World War II—Captain America, the SubMariner, the first Human Torch—then called the Invaders. The bitter enmity between homo sapiens and homo superior was still years in the future— come on; it isn’t that hard —in those days, growing up in rural Shelbyville, David

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  had known that other people bowed to the inevitable, accepted the fact that choosing one thing made all the others impossible—

  if you can’t walk, crawl!

  —realized that life was a process of choosing one thing and forsaking all the rest.

  But David Ferris didn’t have to.

  Years later, in his reading, he came across the words that explained what he had known, instinctively, from birth: that there wasn’t one reality, but millions—that every possible choice that could ever be made was made somewhere, in one of the parallel worlds that, to David’s mutant perception, were as tangible and accessible as the books on the rack at the soda fountain downtown. David could spin the wheel of fortune and make those different worlds real.

  Worlds where Hitler had won World War II. Worlds where humanity had never evolved. Even worlds where humanity was the only known sentient species—no Atlanteans nor Kree, no Skrulls, not even Galactus to threaten sleep.

  He might, with his mutant gift, have grown up to don a gaudy costume, taken a romantic nom de guerre, and gone on to fight crime and/or evil, as Benton Harper—Chicken-Man—used to say on the radio. But David just didn’t have a world-famous sort of nature, and when ultimate evil came to the Midwest, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four were almost always only half a jump behind. get up

  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.

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  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

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  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 c
lass 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 wrhispered 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?

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  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.