“No,” squawked Norman, pushing himself away from the console in his rolling chair. “Get away from me.”
Suddenly somebody stepped between him and Norman. It was Mrs. Dale. “Listen here. I feel sorry for you, but this won’t do anyone any good.”
Oh, yes, it will. But he hesitated. He’d felt a certain sympathy for the woman who, like him, had been a target of Norman’s scorn. Besides, he’d often thought he’d be doing her a favor, depriving her of such a hateful, worthless son. She might even be an asset to The Trent McComb Show.
“Please,” she said, “stay back.”
What was that saying? You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. He reached out and swept her aside effortlessly. She crashed into the wall like a bundle of dry kindling. He put his hand on Norman’s head, closed the fingers, smiling at the perfect fit. This was meant to be.
Then another hand, small brown fingers, closed over his and, to his amazement, pulled the hand way from Norman's skull. He pushed, the servos whined in strain, and those small fingers began to sink into the metal as his might sink into clay. He jerked his hand away. The girl stood next to him, studying him with dark, dispassionate eyes. She looked harmless enough.
Somebody tapped him on the shoulder with enough force that he felt it through the armor. He turned and looked into a face made of dull gray metal, a living statue. “Let me introduce myself,” it said. “You can call me Peg.” And then a metal fist struck the faceplate like a sledgehammer. He reeled back in shock, undamaged but shaken.
Then he raised his right hand, pointed at the statue girl, and fired his concussion cannon.
Skin slipped into the engineer's booth. The man looked up at him, eyes wide. The image inducer had been smashed back in the street fight. “You still on the air, amigo?”
The man nodded.
“Then don’t touch that dial. But you might want to make yourself scarce before this gets ugly.” Then he looked out into the studio. “Too late!”
He lassoed the man, chair and all, with his fingers, and pulled him down to the floor just as Husk blasted through the window and clear through the wall behind them. He looked down at the engineer, who was too stunned to even nod. But he looked okay. “Head for the hills, my man. Got business to take care of.”
He jumped through the shattered window of the booth. Through the glass he could see Synch coming up the hall, evidently having gotten the old lady and the rest of the staff to the elevator. Then he saw M flung through that same glass, and right into Synch.
He ducked behind the console, and spotted Norman cowering in the footwell underneath. “Good show,” Skin said. “Action packed.”
Something like a small machine gun fired, making a jagged line of holes in the wall behind him, and Skin realized that all his skin just made him a bigger target.
Paige hung by one hand, looking at the busy Chicago street six floors below. People were scattering, running from the falling glass and wreckage. If I fall, / am going to be very angry. Assuming I survive. Which was far from a foregone conclusion. “Peg” had blasted her through three walls and an outside window with little apparent damage, but she was uncertain as to the limitations of her powers, much less any particular transformation.
She pedaled her feet, looking for purchase below, and managed to get her other hand over the windowsill, glass crunching harmlessly under her metal fingers. Her brother always said, Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
She pulled herself up through the window, clambered to her feet, and charged through the remains of the three offices she’d smashed. When she got back to Norman’s studio, it looked like ground zero: walls, windows, everything smashed, only Norman’s console in the middle of it relatively unharmed.
The team seemed to have pulled back, and she could see why, as Jono stood in what used to be the hall, building up for one of his blasts.
“Chamber, don’t!” she yelled. “You cut loose up here, and you’ll kill half of Chicago with broken glass alone!”
The raging energy that pulsed inside Jono seemed to pull back, but then a beam of force lashed out anyway, enveloping the shaggy monstrosity that stood in the middle of the studio, tearing at it like a hurricane. Pieces of it peeled off and flew away.
As the blast subsided, Paige saw that Jono had not used the full extent of his power, just enough to blast away the thing’s disguise and reveal what was underneath. It was another of the armored tin men they’d battled on the street. But not like them. This one was much tougher.
Then she saw movement behind the console, saw Angelo emerge dragging Walt Norman across the floor, saw the tin man turning, raising his arms to fire at point-blank range.
“Chamber,” she hissed, “we’ve got to distract him! Draw his fire!”
The Expatriate’s plan was as much in ruins as Norman’s studio. He didn’t know if the mike was still live, but it wasn’t important. The damage had been done the moment the real Peg had spoken. With his disguise ripped away, even that part of the pretense was over. Now there was nothing left but escape and revenge.
Even killing Norman would be merely an amusement. Everyone would indeed be talking about this show tomorrow, but they wouldn’t be talking about the martyr Norman or his mutant killer. They’d be talking about a fool murdered by his own blind ambitions.
He’d salvage something out of this. Somehow, even without his communications network, he’d salvage his organization, or at least part of it. He’d rebuild. He’d go on. But first he had to kill these mutant brats for what they’d done to him.
Then he heard something move behind him. Norman? One of the kids? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, he would kill it. He powered the concussion cannon and the flamethrower, and turned.
The metal girl slammed into his side like a linebacker, throwing him off balance. She was heavy and tough, but not as strong as she looked. A minor obstacle at best. He righted himself and tossed her aside. Then another beam of force slammed into his back, sending him sprawling over the console.
A flare of annoyance shot through him. The boy was more of a threat. Kill him first. He turned, and decided to see how effective the constrictor device was on human flesh. He aimed at the boy, seeing his blasted face and chest. I’m doing him a favor. Then he fired.
Jono saw the tin man aim at him. It was too late to run, too late to duck, and there was no place to hide. His biokinetic blast was his only defense, and he instinctively let loose with all he bad.
Then his world exploded, the blast feeding back on him, surrounding him, the only thing keeping him from being crushed by some invisible force. Energy boiled around him that would have destroyed any normal person, but it was the same energy that filled his shattered body, that was him.
But the outside force pushed against him, squeezing the energy in, crushing him from all sides at once.
Paige pulled herself up from the floor. The armored man had Jono trapped in some kind of beam. A field of energy surrounded Jono, and only his own biokinetic energy seemed to keep it at bay, forming an angry bubble with Jono trapped inside, like a fly in amber.
The Expatriate ignored the warning klaxons going off in his headset. Somehow the boy was resisting the constrictor device. He increased the power, even though the heat he could feel on his arm indicated that it was overloading. He had other weapons. Let this one bum out. As long as he stopped this opponent, there would be plenty of destruction left for the others.
Jono spun head over heels, suspended weightless in a pool of his own energy. He felt the field tighten, would have screamed in pain if he still could. He thought of the school, physics class, how a fusion reactor worked, plasma crushed to impossible heat and pressure inside a magnetic bottle. Will / explode?
If he had to, he would. He heard Paige call his name, and it filled him with a determination to survive. Ever since his power had first appeared he’d focused everything on keeping it in check, but there was no need for that now. With every force left in his
body, he reached out against the crushing force and pushed.
“Feedback overload! Constrictor feedback overload!” The small mechanical voice screamed from the Expatriate’s headphones. He didn’t know what it meant, but he tried to cut off the device anyway. Redline indicators flashed all around his status display, but the constrictor wouldn’t shut down.
“What—?”
Then there was a shriek of bending metal as the armor, every part of it, folded in on itself as though crushed by invisible pliers, folded in on the soft, pink thing trapped inside.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sticks and stones may break my bojies, but names can never
mt. ‘ ' • . . • ' •_
—children’s rhyme
Jono landed on his knees, his hands spasmed painfully into fists. Then he realized that the crushing force was gone, and it was like being bom a second time. “I’m alive!”
Paige rushed to his side, threw her arms around him, and he could see her metal hide peeling off in strips. The girl underneath was crying. Jono realized that he didn’t have the strength left to do anything but fall over. He just wanted to sleep.
“Oh, man,” said Angelo, struggling to release the headpiece on the shattered armor as Norman watched with horror, “this is really harsh.”
The metal around the seam was bent, and even when he’d figured out the latches, he wasn’t sure it was going to come free. He wrapped his skin into the seam to get a better grip on the edge, then threw his weight against it. There was a creak then a snap, and he and the headpiece went flying backward onto the floor.
The man inside was barely conscious. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose.
Norman stared wide eyed at the man, scrambled closer to him on his hands and knees. “Trent! For God’s sake, why?” The fallen man smiled, and it seemed to take most of the energy he had left in him. “Walt, you’ll never know what you were worth to me dead.”
Norman knelt next to him. “Trent...”
“Don’t call me that. I am—the Expatriate.” The man’s eyes seemed to lose focus, and his head fell forward.
Somebody came stumbling through the smashed remains of the studio door, and Angelo looked up. It was an old woman, the one Synch had taken from the studio earlier. There was a bruise on her face, but she seemed unharmed. She fell down next to Norman, throwing her arms around him.
Behind her in the door, he could see Recall. And Sean. And Emma. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Busted.”
Jono felt his strength coming back. He seemed to hurt in parts that didn’t exist anymore. With Paige’s help, he managed to get to his feet. It would be a while before he was blasting anybody, though.
‘‘He said he was the Expatriate,” said Jono. “Never heard of him. What did he have against us?”
Norman looked up at him from the floor. “You killed him. He was my producer, and you killed him!”
The old woman frowned. “Walt, he tried to kill you. He would have if—m
“Murdering mutants is what they are! I was right about everything.” He struggled to his feet, pushing away the woman, and grabbed his microphone like a lifeline. “Is this mike still live? I was right about everything!”
Jono had a bitter feeling of deja vu.
Recall stepped up and took Paige’s arm. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Some radio appearance,” she said. “Guess I showed him.” Then she turned to follow Recall.
“Guess so,” said Jono.
But Emma stepped up to the man, looked him straight in the eye.
A strange expression crossed his face, and he suddenly started tugging at his hair with both hands. “Get out of my brain, you freak!”
“You don’t hate mutants,” said Emma, “not any worse than you hate anyone else. You just tell people what they want to hear. You’d hate kittens if it would help your ratings.” Norman folded, turned his eyes away from her, from them all. “I’m an entertainer,” he said, his voice low. “I never claimed to be anything else. It was never supposed to be real.” Emma glared at him. “Is this real enough for you?” She spun around and marched from the studio. The others were waiting outside. “Let’s go,” said Emma.
Recall looked in at Norman clutching his microphone. “No,” he said. “You go on without me. He wants a mutant on his show, he’s going to get one.”
Paige grabbed his shoulder as he started to walk back. He shrugged her off. “Let me do this, Paige. It’s what I do. It’s what I was meant to do.”
He walked back into the shattered studio and snatched the microphone from Norman’s hand.
Jono wondered if Paige was going to stay, too, but instead she walked with the rest of them to the stairwell. The old woman was standing by the door when they got there, seemingly uncertain if she should go in or not. As Jono walked past her, he felt her hand on his shoulder. He turned.
She tried to look at him, shying away from his face. ‘ ‘Thank you,” she said, “for saving my son’s life.”
Paige followed the others as they walked through the empty building lobby. Emergency crews were pulling up outside, and they stood off to one side as firemen and police ran past to the elevators. If any of them thought to turn their way, Emma would undoubtedly take care of it. Behind the empty security guard’s desk, a radio was turned on, and from it, she could hear Recall’s voice.
“What you’ve just heard, if you can hear this at all, was a group of young mutants saving the life of a man they had every reason to hate. I’m one of them, but not one of them. I’m a mutant, and I hated this man too. But now I see that hate is wasted on him. He’s empty. He’s just words. And you can’t hate the wind. ’ ’
ONAIR
After the amazing on-air terrorist attack that shut down production for almost a week, The Walt Norman Show returns to the air with a new format, and a new cohost, Chicago college student and selfadmitted mutant Scooter McCloud, who goes by the air name Recall, joins the show as new cohost to provide a counterpoint to Norman. The show’s new producer, Susan Kris, reports that sketch work will take a backseat to serious talk in the new format. Also, in a new phone-in segment, Recall will attempt to use his mutant abilities to help callers find lost items. Says Recall, * ‘This isn’t a freak show for people’s amusement. I just have a gift, and I want to use it to help people if I can.”
—Radio Trade Daily Web Site item
Paige gave Chill, then Pound, a hug as they stood outside the Xabago.
“Recall would have been here if he could.” said
Chill.
Pound just blushed.
“I know,” said Paige.
“You M.O.N.S.T.E.R.s are all right,” said Angelo, slapping Chill on the arm. “You ever get to Massachusetts, you look us up. We’ll be at Xavier’s School, for sure.” He turned to Jubilee. “When did Sean say our grounding ends?”
She shrugged. “Something about ‘when the sun bums out,’ I think.”
Jono shook Chill’s hand, then Pound’s, then wordlessly climbed into the RV.
“Probably won’t be much fun on the trip home,” observed Chill.
Paige shrugged. “I think we’ve seen enough of America for one summer. If nothing happens the rest of the trip, I don’t think any of us will mind. Grounding isn’t such a bad thing.”
Chill smiled. “You look out for the bunch of them, you hear? You and me, we’re a lot alike in some ways. You just remember, you were just trying to do what’s right, the best way you knew how.”
She smiled as she climbed into the Xabago. “We all do.”
Somewhere along Interstate 95 in rural North Carolina, a poorly rendered two-hundred-foot tall, reinforced-concrete statue of Dr. Doom loomed over the surrounding countryside. For fifty cents (tax not included), visitors could climb a spiral staircase (three hundred and eighty-five metal steps) up through his right leg to an observation platform inside his helmet, step up to a handrail just inside the mouth of his fearsome mask, and gaze out over miles of numbingl
y uninteresting marshland.
He stood guard over Little Latveria, a truck stop and tourist Mecca along the long, empty freeway that connects Florida with the great cities of the northeast. Doubtless the real Victor von Doom would have destroyed the entire facility in a fit of rage, if indeed he were aware of it, and perhaps the entire state of North Carolina, not entirely beneath his notice, merely a footnote on a deed to a property he planned to acquire some
day, in the course of taking over the rest of the world.
But for now, all was peaceful below the feet of the armored giant, where sprouted a tasteless little village of souvenir shops, fireworks stands, eateries, T-shirt shops, and motels (the largest of them a one-half-scale replica of Castle Doom constructed entirely of cinder block), all tended by bored local teenagers dressed in simulated Latverian peasant garb.
The irony hadn’t escaped Buford T. Hollis, the man better known as Razorback, as he’d pulled in to rent a room for the night, but he was exhausted from the day’s drive, and the CB chatter reported that the softest beds and the best bacon waffles along the interstate were to be found at Little Latveria. His empty stomach and aching back (a high-school football injury come back to haunt him) had overcome his better nature.
Thus it was he who found himself in a tower room of the Motel Doom, convenient to the ice machine and the Snack-O-Matic, with a view of Doom’s grim visage looking down over the parking lot. Through the checkered curtains he could see his custom semitruck, the Big Pig III, parked under a streetlight, a small group of curiosity seekers gathered around to gawk.
If any of them had bothered to look up at the window, they wouldn’t have seen Razorback, hero of the moment, only Buford T. Hollis, an Arkansas boy far from home. The clock radio on the table next to the bed showed 9:34 in glowing red numbers, and from its speaker, a young man’s voice could be heard, a voice Buford had been listening to for a long time, a voice that wouldn’t let him sleep, no matter how tired he was.
‘ 'Mutants are all around you, whether you know it or not. They’re your neighbors, your friends, and the kid that bags your groceries at the supermarket. They don’t hide because they want to, or to be secretive, they hide because they’re afraid. They’re afraid of you. Afraid to be the first one and draw attention to themselves. Afraid of what will happen if they do. ’ ’
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