Generation X - Genogoths Read online

  Paige sighed. Every time you started feeling sorry for yourself, there was always somebody worse off. Penance— Penny—had to be about the most lonely person in the world. At least every once in a while Paige could “husk” into a diamond hard form and give her a hug. She bit her lip. “When you get there, tell her we miss her, okay?”

  Sean nodded thoughtfully, then glanced at his watch. “Blast, it’s getting late. Where are Artie and Emma, Leech?” “They come. Miss Emma make Artie take favorite rock collection out of duffel-bag.”

  Mr. Cassidy hefted one of Emma’s bags experimentally. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”

  Artie and Leech, the school’s youngest students, were mutants too; mutants of the type that even other mutants sometimes shied from. Leech’s mutation had left him so deformed that he seemed more amphibian than human, bald headed, his greenish skin smooth and cool to the touch, his eyes featureless yellow orbs. He possessed the ability to neutralize other mutants’ powers.

  Artie, who was just shuffling into the room, looked a little closer to normal from the neck down, except for skin the color of a bad sunburn, but from the neck up he was different, his skull bald and oversized, covered with bumps, his eyes huge and white. Artie could link telepathically with others and project images into their minds. These images were his primary means of communication, since his mutation had also robbed him of the power of speech.

  “Hey, Artie,” said Jono, “word up?”

  Angelo and Jubilee were definitely a bad influence on Jono’s speech patterns, Paige noted. Then a clear image of a broken heart formed in Paige’s mind.

  Angelo took the stocking cap from the boy’s small, pink hand and pulled it down over the top of his head. “Cheer up, spud, your rocks will still be here when you get back. I’ll take care of them personally.”

  Artie lifted his eyes and smiled just a little. They were bombarded with a flash of images, candy, video games, Speed Racer cartoons, currently some of Artie’s favorite things. His way of saying “thank-you.”

  Emma Frost entered the room carrying a pair of small suit-fcases, and handed them to Sean without comment. She carefully smoothed a stray stand of platinum blonde hair out of her face with a manicured fingertip, rendering herself nearly perfect. Thin, beautiful, rich, cultured, and one of the most powerful mutant telepaths on Earth, Emma literally did have everything. Maybe that explained her luggage.

  Emma surveyed the room. “I think that’s all.”

  “I bloody hope so,” said Sean. “Ye didn’t pack this much when we drove cross-country with the kids last summer.” “You didn’t see it, Sean. We were in a motor home, I had closets. Besides, that was merely a trip through the boondocks. This time I’m packing for a trip to Europe. It’s an entirely different thing.”

  “Scotland,” corrected Sean. “Muir-bloody-Island.”

  “But I thought maybe we could make a side trip to the Continent, do some shopping—”

  Sean looked around at all the luggage, “Shopping! For what, woman? Sure’n ye have it all already?”

  Emma turned away from him sharply, her body language giving a distinct “you’re dismissed” message. People around here had some very interesting ways of communicating. She looked at the assembled students. “I really don’t know about this. Bishop offered to come and keep an eye on the school while we’re gone.”

  Jubilee rolled her eyes and sighed. “Oh, that would be fun. Bishop is such a party animal.”

  Jono stepped between Jubilee and Emma. “What Jubes means to say is, we aren’t X-Babies here, and it’s spring break. We can take care of our own selves for a couple of weeks, no worries. The pantry is stocked, the satellite dish is warm, and we won’t even have to leave campus.”

  Emma nodded. “See that you don’t.” She opened her purse and took out a tiny satellite phone, one of the new Reed Richards designed models that was all the rage. “Keep this with you at all times.” Her eyes scanned the students one-by-one. Finally she handed the phone to Paige. “You take it. You I can trust. Mostly.” She considered. “No radio call-in shows this fime, okay?”

  Paige felt herself blush, and hoped that it wasn’t somehow visible on her now transparent skin. She’d gotten them all in a heap of trouble that way last summer in Chicago. “No call-in shows,” she replied.

  The front door opened and Emma’s drivers started taking the bags away. The drivers were matched muscle men, identical except that one had skin of pastel pink, the other pale green. Paige had tried to get Emma to tell her if they were mutants, aliens, or had just fallen into vats of industrial-strength Easter-egg color, but she’d never gotten a straight answer. You hang around with this bunch long enough, she thought, some things you learn just to not ask about. Especially when it came to Emma Frost’s past.

  The last of the suitcases disappeared into the waiting limousine. “Time to go,” announced Sean. Leech grabbed Artie’s hand and the two of them charged down the step, Leech squealing all the way.

  Emma Frost took a last look as she passed through the door and Sean followed, closing the door behind him. “Mind yourself,” he said.

  The students all stared at the door silently for a while, listening up as the car drove away. Finally Angelo slumped against the door, his knees sagging slightly.

  “Dios, I thought they’d never leave.”

  Jubilee did a little dance, multicolored streamers of plasma shooting from her fingers in one of the more restrained applications of her mutant power. “Ding, dong, party-on, ding, dong, the witch is gone!”

  Just then, the phone in Paige’s hand rang. Paige leaned over and pulled back the curtain. The limo wasn’t out of the driveway yet. She sighed and held the phone out to Jubilee. “I think she heard you.”

  Jubilee answered the phone. She didn’t say much, but she did a lot of listening for several minutes. “Yeah, bye,” she said and slapped the mouthpiece closed. “Like, how does she do that?”

  ' >Angelo chuckled and slumped the rest of the way to the floor, where he sat, baggy elbows propped on the knees of his dirty, gray sweat-pants. “She says she doesn’t eavesdrop on what we’re thinking.”

  “She must not,” said Jono, “or we’d never bloody get away with anything, and,” he waved his hands, “we do.”

  Paige nodded. “You get away with plenty, that’s for sure.” “What,” said Jono, “about that night you got yourself drunk and puked your guts out?”

  She shot him a nasty look.

  His eyes smiled. He delighted in teasing her sometimes, but Paige didn’t like being reminded of one of her more moronic mistakes.

  He plunged ahead. “You act like the perfect student, Gel, but I can see right through you.”

  “So can I,” quipped Angelo who bent down to peer through her transparent body.

  “She just saves it for special occasions,” suggested Ev, who had taken an umbrella from the stand by the door and was fencing with the coat-rack. He jabbed. “Ha! Got you right in your mittens!”

  There was a knock. It was the last thing any of them expected. Angelo jumped about three feet away from the door and stared at it. “Did you hear a car, compadresT

  They all shook their heads.

  Another knock, more insistent.

  Ev looked around at the others. “Somebody just ordered the pizza a little early, right? Turned off the security system, too, because they knew pizza was coming. Tell me you ordered pizza.” Nobody responded. “Dang, and it was a good theory.”

  Paige opened the hidden panel under the stairs where the security panel was located. ‘The alarms are on, and show nobody outside. Either there’s a ghost at the door, or they’re good.”

  “Well,” said Jubilee, “somebody answer it.”

  “I’ll answer it,” said Monet in a huff. She stepped toward the door.

  Jono pushed in front of her. “I’ll answer it.” He stepped up to the door and opened the peephole. He stared through it for a while without saying anything. “Bloody hell,”
he finally said, scrambling to unlock and open the door. The tall, young woman standing there looked as though she’d been dragged through the woods. Her black leather pants and vest were dusty, her tank tee-shirt so dirty it was impossible to figure out which band’s logo was printed on the chest. There were sticks and twigs in the shaggy green Mohawk that ran down the center of her head, and bits of grass and leaves in the close cropped hair on the sides. There were small scratches covering every bit of her exposed skin, highlighted with a few larger ones.

  She and Jono stared at each other for a moment.

  “Jono,” she said.

  “Espeth,” he replied.

  She blinked, looked around at the rest of them. “You’ve got to help them, help Chill—the rest.”

  Then her eyes rolled back into her head, and she collapsed in Jono’s arms.

  When Xavier’s was converted from its former role as a prestigious private boarding school into a distant outpost of the Xavier Institute, one of the first changes was the installation of a small, but incredibly advanced, infirmary. Though each of the students had learned basic first-aid, it was fortunate most of the infirmary’s diagnostic and treatment equipment was automated.

  Jono carried Espeth upstairs, and placed her on the examining table, while Ev fired up the machines and let the diagnostic scanners do their stuff. After that, there was nothing to do but wait for a while. Ev tried to shoo everyone out. “It’s getting crowded in here. Give her and the machines some space. I can keep an eye on things.”

  “I’ll stay too,” said Jono, “in case she wakes up.”

  Paige’s lips parted, but she said nothing. She stepped out into the hall and, realizing it had been long enough to allow for another “husk,” started ripping at her skin, returning to normal human form. It occurred to her to wonder how she could strip off transparent flesh to find opaque skin underneath. There were things about her powers she still didn’t understand.

  She thought about Jonothan and sighed. There were some things maybe she’d never understand. She strolled down the hall and sat heavily on the top stair of the big staircase. She leaned against the banister, the oiled and polished rail cool against her cheek.

  Her mind flashed back to the previous summer, when they’d first met Espeth, when he had first met Espeth. It happened at the beginning of their cross-country road trip from Seattle back to the school. They’d stopped at the campus of Pacific University, and the headquarters of a campus mutant

  support organization called M.O.N.S.T.E.R.—Mutants Only Need Sympathy, Tolerance, and Equal Rights.

  They’d all made new friends there, especially the “Mutant Musketeers,” Chill, Recall, and Pound, who’d paralleled their trip across country, and shared some adventures, and misadventures, with them.

  At the M.O.N.S.T.E.R. house there had been a party, and a dance, and there had been a bunch of self-proclaimed mutant groupies called “Genogoths.” That’s where Jono had met Espeth. She was one of them.

  The Genogoths had been a little rough, a little scary, but Chill had assured them the Genogoths helped mutants, especially those without the power to help themselves. They provided M.O.N.S.T.E.R. with information about anti-mutant activities, and helped keep them safe.

  That’s what Chill had said, but Paige wasn’t so sure. With ’ their black clothes and in-your-face attitude, they seemed to her to be posers, looking for something dangerous to attach themselves to, something that would make them look cool. Or maybe she was just rationalizing her concern. Maybe she was just worried that, by comparison, a certain little mutant girl from Kentucky had to look pretty boring, especially to a worldly older guy from England.

  Jubilee appeared from down the hall and sat heavily on the other end of the step, seemingly paying no attention to Paige. She was smacking loudly on some bubble gum, pausing only to blow a large pink bubble, which she popped with a tiny firework from her fingertip. “Pretty interesting, huh?”

  “What’s interesting?” Paige didn’t feel like talking, but she’d fallen into another conversational trap.

  “Jono wanting to stay in there with her.”

  Paige sighed. “He’s just trying to be helpful.”

  “Pretty conveniently helpful.”

  Paige frowned. Why didn’t people just go away?

  “They had a thing in Seattle. Doesn’t that worry you?” “They danced. Once.”

  “It was enough of a dance,” said Monet, “to keep you two going in circles all the way from Seattle to Chicago.”

  Paige was startled by the voice, which came from immediately to her right. She looked over to see Monet hovering in mid-air, looking at her through the banister.

  “Hey,” complained Jubilee, “no flying in the school.” Monet sniffed. “No headmasters, no rules. I thought that was the whole point of the oldsters going away.”

  “But,” said Jubilee, “I liked that rule.”

  “You can’t fly,” said Monet.

  “I just said, I liked that rule.”

  Paige growled in frustration. “Will you two just stop it!” Jubilee jerked a thumb at Paige. “She’s jealous,” she explained. “Iam not jealous!”

  “Who’s jealous?” said Angelo, who had just strolled out of the hallway.

  '“Oh, Lord,” said Paige, letting her head sag between her knees, “it’s a conspiracy.”

  Angelo stood at the edge of the landing and leaned his elbows on the railing. “So what do you make of this? I mean, we see this chica like, once, months ago, and thousands of miles away, and she shows up on our doorstep.”

  “She must have missed Jono a lot” said Jubilee.

  Paige couldn’t help but let the irritation slip into her voice. “She didn’t come because she missed Jono.” Then she thought for a moment. “She mentioned ‘Chill and the others.’ That’s the connection. She knows we’re pals, and that we’d help them if they’re in trouble. That’s the connection.”

  “That,” said Monet, “is wishful thinking. Maybe you’re just hoping to see your little boyfriend, Recall.”

  “He had a crush on me, Monet, not the other way around. Don’t you have a broom to go ride or something?”

  “No,” said Angelo, “she’s right. That’s the connection. It makes sense. So the Musketeers, they probably are in some kind of trouble.”

  Jubilee popped another bubble. “I think we’re the ones in trouble, you know?” She pointed at the phone still clutched in Paige’s hand. “You should call the grups. Like, their plane probably hasn’t even left yet.”

  Ev popped his head around the corner. “Hey,” he said, “she’s awake. You’d better hear this.”

  They all trotted down the hall to the infirmary, with the exception of Monet, who swooped over their heads and beat them all there.

  “She’s okay,” explained Ev before they went in. “She’s got scratches, bruises, some exposure, she’s dehydrated and hasn’t been eating well lately, but that’s just the kind of superficial stuff that the gear in here is great at fixing. She shouldn’t even need a doctor.”

  “Well,” said Paige, “that’s one less troublesome phone call I’ll have to make. I should still call Ms. Frost and Mr. Cassidy though.” She held up the phone and started to dial.

  Jono held up his hand. “Hold off on that till you hear what she has to say.”

  As they entered, Espeth was trying to sit up on the bio-bed, but Jono gently put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back down. “I came to tell you about Chill and the guys. They’ve been kidnapped, and they need your help. I risked a lot—I risked everything to come here.”

  “If they’re in immediate danger,” Paige asked, “why didn’t you go to the police?”

  Espeth shook her head. “It’s not like that. They were kidnapped by the government.”

  Paige and Ev looked at each other. Given some of the actions taken by anti-mutant government agencies in the past, it wasn’t unthinkable.

  “Taken? Why?” asked Paige. “And where?”

/>   “To a secret government laboratory' in rural South Carolina. They want to experiment on them, something to do with the Hound program. You’ve heard of it?”

  Paige nodded. “The government wants mutant trackers and hunters, ostensibly to capture mutant criminals, but more likely to round us all up into prison camps if they think they can get away with it.”

  “They’re a lot closer to that than you think, than anyone thinks. But the Genogoths wouldn’t believe me, they wouldn’t help. That’s why I came to you.”

  Paige laughed. “The Genogoths? Your bunch of mutant groupie pals? A lot of good they’d do. This sounds like a job for the X-Men, or the Avengers if they’re in the mood, not a bunch of losers in Halloween costumes.”

  “Paige! Zip it, Gel!” Jono glared at her.

  “No,” interrupted Espeth. She painfully propped herself up on her elbows despite Jono’s protests. “She’s right to be suspicious of what I am, or how I know the things I know.” She looked troubled. “You’re just not going to believe me until I tell you everything, are you?” She sighed. “Okay, but look, I’m violating a sacred oath with what I’m about to tell you. You have to swear that, no matter what you decide to do, you have to swear on—-on Professor Xavier and everything you hold dear, that you’ll never tell another soul. Never.”

  The Gen Xers all looked at one another.

  “Swear!” Espeth was evidently quite serious.

  Paige blinked. She sounded awfully serious for somebody who was supposed to be a poser.

  “We swear,” said Jono.

  Ev nodded, as did Angelo.

  “I’m good at secrets,” said Monet.

  Jubilee plucked the chewing gum out of her mouth, looked at it unhappily. “Yeah. Sure.”

  They all looked at Paige. “I’m not so sure about this.”

  Jono locked eyes with her. “We don’t have to do anything, luv. Just listen. How can it hurt?”

  Let me count the ways. She took a deep breath. “ ’Kay.” Espeth’s eyes swept over them all, as though taking their measure. “At the core, the Genogoths aren’t what they seem, what they’re supposed to seem.” Her eyes met Paige’s. “You see groupies, children dressed to scare their parents, masqueraders in black with a mutant fetish. There are some of those, yes, sometimes useful to us, but not much more. They provide our cover, our smokescreen, our camouflage, and the pool from which we recruit those few worthy for our inner-circle.”