Generation X Page 3

  The other mutants continued to cheer: “Husk! Husk! Husk! Husk!”

  Then the door of the headmaster’s office flew open and out stomped Sean Cassidy followed by Monet St. Croix and Emma Frost. Everyone froze in place, waiting for the Banshee yell that could shatter diamond. Husk gulped.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Sean said in a voice that was not a Banshee scream but nonetheless quite loud, “Not in the house!”

  “Sorry man,” said Angelo hanging from the ceiling fan.

  “Uh ... uh ... sorry,” said Paige hanging off the wall.

  “We all apologize, sir,” from Jono.

  “Chamber,” Sean addressed Jonothon, “why don’t you fly on up to that fan and help your friend down?”

  “Right away, sir.”

  Jubilee especially was disappointed to learn that the student body were not going off after super-villains in a time warp. Jono was non-committal, Paige still contrite especially when she saw the little pockmarks she had left in the wall and the rips in the rug no one had yet mentioned. All Sean had ordered Paige to do was put on a hospital gown in case she had a sudden compulsion to shed her diamond skin for her more accustomed flesh.

  Angelo and Everett thought it would be a good time to make themselves scarce, so without bringing it up in actual words they dropped a field trip request form in the slot outside Sean’s office door. Before the meeting started, they had optimistically packed a few clothes for a weekend trip to Boston.

  “Everybody here?” Sean asked his evidently recovered students who draped themselves over assorted chairs and couches in the sitting room of the main building. “Almost everybody here?”

  Everybody was here except for Penance, who made even Jonothon feel less of a misanthrope. Penance had the gravitational pull of a tiny piece of a neutron star; you could feel it when she entered a room.

  ‘ ‘Has anyone seen Penance today?’ ’ Sean asked. Nobody had.

  “Two items on the agenda today, lads and lassies,” the headmaster continued. “A new student—”

  Raised eyebrows and whispers among the half-dozen attending students of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

  “—and an unidentified manifestation on our campus this morning.”

  “Manifestation?” Jubilee asked.

  “What went on in the biosphere this morning,” Jono told her.

  “You said it was an alien invasion or something.” “No alien invasion. Just some kind of mirage or something. I was trying to tell you.”

  “You weren’t trying very hard,” Jubilee sniffed. “What fun would that be?”

  “I was hoping,” Banshee reclaimed the floor, “that we were about done with fun for today.”

  The group was uncharacteristically well behaved this afternoon. The headmaster was not going to question his sudden good luck.

  “Our new student is named Walter Nowland,” Sean said, “and he’s from a faraway and very flat land called Nebraska. I met and interviewed him and his family when I was in Chicago last month. Walter’s a good lad and I think he’ll fit in fine here. He’ll arrive sometime today. His code name’ll be Statis.”

  “Sounds like he’s from like Beverly Hills or Scars-dale or something,” said Angelo.

  “Statis with an T,” Sean corrected, “not Status with a ‘U’. Has to do with generating fields of static electricity.”

  “Gotcha,” from Skin.

  “Pretty original talent,” Jubilee suggested with some sarcasm.

  “Not nearly as useful,” Paige cut in, hissing through diamond lips, “as, say, making fireworks out of your anxiety.”

  Jubilee squinted at Husk like a diamond-cutter.

  “We’ve all got the talents we were bom with,” Emma reminded her students, “same as homo sapiens.”

  “Except we’re superior,” Monet pointed out, “technically speaking,” she added primly.

  ‘ ‘Let a Congressman hear you talking like that, young lassie,” Sean warned, “and we’ll be fighting off a whacko militia floating down the Mad River before you can say ‘cultural warfare’.”

  Sean then related the story of the glowing egg in the biosphere, asking Emma and Monet to make any corrections if they felt any were necessary—which they did not. He said that long experience as a mutant had taught him and every X-Man the universal truth that big power attracts big trouble like tall trees attract lightning. He asked Jono if he had anything to add; Jono shrugged and said nothing.

  “Is that it?” Jubilee asked impatiently. “I mean, I didn’t really think we were going after time travelers— at least I don’t think I really thought so—but I thought there was something worth going after. Not a cocka-mamie delusion.”

  Monet glared across the room at Jubilee, about to say something, but Emma beat her to it. “It was not a ‘cock-amamie delusion,’ as you so tastelessly put it, Jubilation. I saw it, and I sensed it.”

  “Do you all mean to tell me,” Sean walked around the room with his arms on his hips and his head shaking, “that you’re all so bloody bored and cabin fevered that you’re disappointed we only have mirages in the garden?”

  General murmured agreement.

  Sean looked around at his charges for a few more beats, then threw his head back and laughed like no one had heard him laugh in months. ‘ ‘Welcome to winter in New England, lads and lassies. Get used to it. We convene again tonight to meet our new classmate. You’ve all got major papers due in the next two weeks, I expect you’ll spend a good chunk of the rest of the day pounding them out. Except for you, Paige, you’re due in the infirmary for analysis. Anyone sees Penance, let me know as usual. Dismissed.”

  Somewhere in the air, a consciousness rose. It wafted among the pines and snowy surfaces of the estate, through the water under the ice, across the frozen surface of the forest where hibernating life readied itself to bloom and stretch. It floated through the odd compound of flora where it had first met the female, Emma Frost, and over the short expanse into the warren where the beings congregated.

  The immature ones would be easy. And they were powerful indeed. The older male was strong willed but without sufficient imagination. He would be unavailable, but he would not be an impediment. Not as long as he remained indulgent of the weakness of the Frost female.

  The consciousness took a sense of the surroundings: bucolic, pastoral. These beings found it beautiful, especially in relation to the whiteness outside. The phrase “winter in New England” had sent shudders of varying degrees through the sensibilities of the immature ones.

  That would be useful as well.

  Paige hated the infirmary, but at least she was used to it. She had her own routine. Whenever she metamorphosed, either spontaneously or on a lark as she had this time, she had to take all sorts of readings of her vitals to help Sean—and the powers-that-be back at the Xavier Institute in New York—to figure out how Paige could control her special talent.

  She started with blood pressure, almost undetectable in her current state. She supposed that not only was blood flowing more slowly, but also that the meter couldn’t get a reading through diamond-hard skin. And drawing her blood for testing was pretty much out of the question, she realized with relief. There were certainly a dozen other even grosser tests and samples she could take care of, though, and reluctantly she began to go about them.

  Suddenly, she realized there was someone with her in the lab—a figure in shadow between a cabinet and the far wall. The shadow the cabinet cast seemed larger than before.

  “Hello?” Paige called.

  And Penance clattered out from the comer, dragging most of the shadow with her.

  Penance had no other name that anyone was sure of, except Yvette, and that might have been something Em-plate made up. From what they could determine, she was perhaps fourteen years old. She had little history other than as a slave to Emplate, the tyrant who sucked on mutants’ life-force in order to live and found in Penance someone who could survive to be fed on another day.

/>   Penance seemed bigger than she was; in fact she was smaller than Jubilee. But her mass was enormous. She was as dense as the compressed core of the Earth and her physiology reflected that: limbs and digits that were collapsed into long pointed tendrils; a face that was a gaunt death mask; ribbons of hair like the barbed coils that top electrified fences. Her very touch on normal flesh could be disastrous, like the hoof of a mule trying to touch a bead of dew on a rose petal. She was always in shadow. Light seemed not to reflect off her smooth features.

  Emma stuck her head in the infirmary door. “Paige, did you call for—oh.” She stopped at the sight of the girl approaching Husk.

  When Sean had first freed Penance from Emplate’s bondage and enrolled her at the school, she responded with hostility. She resisted any attempt he made to talk with her, realizing somehow that his voice was also his weapon. At one point, she nearly vivisected Sean with her fingertips. Since then, though she had been assigned a room, no one knew if she had ever stayed in it. In fact, no one knew where and how she spent most of her time. Every once in awhile one of the girls—Jubilee had been especially good that way—would just talk to her, without any idea whether she understood a word. Sometimes this seemed to comfort her a bit. Sometimes not.

  Penance shuffled slowly toward the many-faceted Paige, leaving a trail of pockmarks on the tile infirmary floor as she moved.

  “Sean,” Emma called down the hall as gently and quietly as she could and still have the sound travel, “it’s Penance. In the infirmary.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” and the headmaster barrelled

  down the hall into the entrance of the room.

  “Wait/’ said Emma and put a hand on his beefy arm. And he did.

  Half a dozen adolescent heads popped in behind Sean and Emma, wondering what was going on. As they all watched. Penance—her deadly arms extended—shambled toward Paige, in diamond skin and a hospital gown.

  “What?’' Sean was apprehensive but Emma tightened her hand on his forearm.

  And Penance wrapped her arms around the diamond-hard skin of Paige—who had never managed to turn to something this resilient before—and rested her head on the diamond shoulder. And Paige hugged Penance back.

  With each squeeze, Paige’s diamond flesh began to crack and chip, but she did not break the embrace.

  “What?” Sean said again, and noticed a smile on the White Queen’s face—but not her usual smile, the one that looked like a feral animal about to devour its prey. This was a genuine smile, and the beginnings of a tear started to pool in her ice-blue eyes—both were rare phenomena with Emma Frost.

  “Do you have any idea,” Emma said, “how long it must be since that child has been hugged?”

  And Penance and Paige held each other that way for many minutes, until a fissure appeared in Paige’s diamond surface to signal the return of the girl’s perfect soft skin. They all left to give Paige some privacy. Penance seemed reluctant to go.

  After the transformation, Paige went to her room to dress. She ran back to the infirmary, but Penance was gone.

  Sighing, she went out into the snow to jog along the riverbank, alone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PUNCTUATED

  EQUILIBRIUM

  In Stockbridge, Harley Nowland had stopped for gas.

  “Think we’re close, Wally?” he asked his son who huddled under a blanket in the from seat. “Dunno.”

  “Maybe get directions, y’think?”

  “’Kay.”

  "Think I should tell them where we’re really going?'' “Dunno.”

  Harley Nowland sat in the car at the self-serve pump for a moment, while his son Walter shivered in the blankets next to him. He should have put the boy on a plane for heaven’s sake like Dora said. A long road trip like this can only make things worse.

  “Maybe I should just get a road map, y’think, Wally?”

  “’Kay.”

  “Sir. car. I help you with something?” The smiley young face hovered outside the window less than a foot from Harley's nose. “This is the self-serve pump.” '■Right'' Harley said, getting out of the old 1979 Delta 88. The boy wore a green jump suit, the name “Tim” embroidered in yellow thread over his pocket “Know how to use the pump, sir?” Tim asked.

  “I guess I do, son,” Harley grinned. “You don't drive from Nebraska to Massachusetts in four days without knowing how to use a gas pump.”

  “All the way from Nebraska in this old beauty?" “Beauty is right. She ain’t what she used to be. No

  trouble these last four days, though. Highway driving blows those tubes right out, yessir.”

  Tim smiled and turned to go back into the station but Harley stopped him.

  “Hey fella, there is something you could do for me if you would.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You guys sell maps?”

  “Yes sir. Massachusetts and Connecticut, including metropolitan Boston, Hartford, and New Haven, New York State with metropolitan New York, and a detail of the upper Hudson River Valley, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and I think we’ve got a couple of Maines left with the Maritime Provinces.”

  “Local,” Harley finally stopped him. “Local’s fine. We’re real local now, I think.”

  “Straight up, sir.”

  Tim hotfooted it into the station as Harley filled the tank with regular unleaded. They didn’t sell leaded gas much outside the Midwest any more. Harley’d blown his catalytic converter off with an acetylene torch years ago and put a wider funnel under his gas cap so he could get the cheaper fuel in. Didn’t do the air supply any good but it sure saved Harley a few bucks. This trip hadn’t, though. What with food on the road—Waiter was partial to fast food—motels every night because the kid got the chills, and all the cough medicine he had to buy along the way, these four days had cost easily as much as a plane ticket. And now he would have to drive back to Nebraska alone.

  Harley paid Tim for the gas and the map and Tim sprayed and washed the Olds’ windshields as Harley puzzled over the arrangement of the roads before him. The hamlet of Snow Valley was a tiny open black circle to the north of Route 9. There was a little access road called Route 9A that jagged off the main thoroughfare to bisect the little circle and merge right back in, but there were no roads going in or out of Snow Valley anywhere else. That Cassidy fellow that Dora thought was such a trustworthy guy had clearly said 1 ‘North of Snow Valley,” but there was nothing north of Snow Valley. The Mass Pike ran east and west a good seven or eight miles to the north, on the other side of what looked to be a wooded area with a few creeks and three or four small mountains. North of that was Route 20 heading west into New York state and east to Boston.

  Well, Harley supposed he would just go to Snow Valley and ask and hope for the best.

  Outside, Tim finished spit-shining the windows and saluted smartly, stepping back to signal Harley on his way. Next to Harley, his son Walter shivered and coughed. It depressed him, and being depressed reminded Harley to lose the puzzled look and contrive a grin for the boy’s benefit. Harley went to start up the car and all the key in the ignition did was click.

  Harley sighed despite himself. “We’re out of charge. Knew I shouldn’t’ve let you watch the TV plugged into the lighter. Ain’tcha had enough of Kathie Lee Gifford for one lifetime?”

  Immediately Harley realized he’d blown the whole show of normalcy he was trying to create for the boy’s benefit. Certainly at sixteen, Walter Nowland had not had enough of anything for one lifetime.

  After an uncomfortable beat Walter said, “Dunno.”

  So here Harley was, stranded in a twenty-year-old car in a New England winter with a sick teenager. Good thing they were at a gas station. Harley figured that even if this “Tim” person couldn’t translate that grin into mechanical know-how he could at least let Harley use the tools in his garage and rig something up. But instead, Walter reached a tattooed left hand out from under his blanket toward the empty lighter socket on the dashboard.

&n
bsp; “Leave the key in, Dad,” Walter said, and a tiny bolt of electricity from Walter’s long bony forefinger bathed the interior of the empty lighter cylinder in blinding white light and turned its surface black. The car shuddered. Harley, leaning his bare arm on the metal of the car door, felt the hair on his head and arms stiffen. Then the old car started up and purred like a kitten.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Tim tapped on the window on Walter’s side as Harley was about to drive away.

  Harley leaned over his son and rolled down the window a crack.

  “Did you find what you were looking for on the map, sir?”

  “Well close enough I suppose.”

  “Don’t go anywhere,” and Tim ran back into the station to come right out with a rolled up tube of paper in his hand. “A little sideline of mine,” he said as he handed the tube of paper through Harley’s window.

  Harley slid off the paper collar holding it together and unrolled a decorated tourist map of the Berkshire Hills Recreation Area. There was the Butternut Basin Ski Area, Tanglewood, the site of Alice’s Restaurant memorialized in the Arlo Guthrie song, and, straddling the banks of a narrow stream that came down from one of the Berkshires just north of Snow Valley, a little smudge of land the map called “Xavier’s School,” with a nameless dead end road leading into it from Route 9A.

  “More like it,” Harley told Tim. “What do I owe you, pal?”

  “On the house,” Tim said. “Maybe when the kid’s feeling better he can come help out in the garage.”

  Even Walter managed a smile before they drove off.

  Paige thought she could navigate the crooked banks of the Mad River blindfolded at a dead run. Sometimes, running around a blind comer through the woods, she closed her eyes as she pounded the dirt and rocks for as long as she could stand it, just to prove it to herself. She hadn’t tripped up yet. She had been here since the beginning of last summer and she thought she had seen all the moods of this quick, shallow river.

  When she had first met this stream flowing down from the mountain it seemed rather lazy. It flowed in an even, steady rhythm under, over, around, and through the debris and undergrowth of the woods, down the occasional little cascade. It slowed over the months into a trickle. Then with the autumn rains, it grew again and even muddied its banks with overflow and seepage for days after a storm ended.