“What the hell is this?” he asked aloud.
On the ribbon, printed in black, was a demand—or perhaps, he thought, suddenly heartsick, a declaration of war: MUTANT FREEDOM NOW!
Interlude
He came in to Alkali Lake the back way, over the mountains from the north. He cut through a saddleback notch and made his way down to the glacier by a trail so poor even a bighorn sheep would think twice about trying it.
Before reaching the base of the escarpment he went to ground, taking cover in a jumbled pile of scree and rocks that gave him a superb view of the glacier and minimal chance of being seen himself. The last stretch was open country; he’d have to wait for the right moment to make his approach. He didn’t mind. When he had to, he could be inhumanly patient.
There was a road up to the complex from the south, as miserable in its own way as the path he’d followed. Blacktop asphalt, barely two lines wide, beat to shit by the pounding of too many heavily laden trucks over too many years with hardly a thought given to maintenance. It wound its way better than seventy miles through the snowy mountains, with a decent-sized town at the far end that catered mainly to the hunting and camping crowd who wanted something wilder than Lake Louise or even Jasper. There was a hamlet some fifty miles farther that consisted of a saloon, some gas pumps, and a batch of cabins that rented by the hour.
Trouble was, if he took the road, they’d know he was coming.
He was a short man, with a stocky, powerful physique, as though the frame of an athletic six-footer had been squashed down to five and change. To look at his face, you’d think him a young man, his features weathered by a life spent mainly outdoors. His dress—jeans as worn as his boots—marked him as an itinerant wrangler or cycle bum, blue collar for sure. This was a man who worked with his hands, not his mind.
His hair was dark, sweeping back from his forehead in a wave that looked natural on him but somehow . . . wrong for a human being. He wore his sideburns long, right down to the line of his jaw, in a fashion more in keeping with the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.
His eyes were the giveaway. Like his hair, they were right for his face, yet at the same time they had no right belonging to one so apparently youthful. These eyes missed nothing and had seen too much. They were the eyes of a hunter. A predator.
His name was Logan, but the only reason he knew it was that it was printed on his dog tags. A name, a serial number, a blood type. No indication of nationality or branch of service. The only clue, if you could call it that, was that the information was printed in Roman letters. Not Arabic, not Cyrillic, not Chinese or Japanese kanji. He had no past worth the name, only a present filled to bursting with questions. Here was where he hoped to find some answers.
But first he needed a storm.
He got a beaut.
It came in during the night, boiling off the Continental Divide with winds and snow to spare, a howling monster that seemed bent on scouring the landscape down to bare rock. The rocks afforded a fair measure of protection from the wind, but there was nothing he could do about the cold. The temperature was close to freezing before the storm. Once the blizzard started, it quickly dropped past zero. His jacket was fleece lined, but against this kind of elemental fury, that was no help at all. Hypothermia set in almost immediately. It was a pain, but he’d endured far worse. As often as he froze during the night, his healing factor kicked into gear and brought him back to life.
The weather system proved to be as fast-moving as it was intense. Toward morning, a shift in wind velocity told him it was time to get moving. Timing was perfect. The fury of the storm had probably nailed any of the installation’s remote sensors positioned to watch the “back door.” And any living sentries were just as likely to be hunkered down in their bunkers, dreaming dreams of “Baywatch.”
He was in place by dawn, a spectacular sunrise that went hand in hand with the equally impressive—although far more bleak—vista that spread out below him. Dominating the scene was the dam, a thousand feet high, three times that across, holding back a lake that stretched for miles. A huge generating station at its base told the reason for its existence, to provide an inexhaustible source of hydroelectric power. Thing is, there were no towering pylons marching away downriver to carry all this energy to a hungry populace. What was generated here stayed here, to be used by the Alkali Lake Industrial Complex.
There was a fence blocking access to the crest of the dam, but it was no obstacle. The poles and links were so rusted and twisted by the fierce mountain weather that he simply stepped over. He found an older sign than the first, barely held to the fence by a scrap of wire, informing intruders that this was a government installation, a military base, and top secret besides, and warning of the most dire consequences if anyone was of a mind to trespass.
Below the dam, the forest had been cleared for the better part of a mile to allow for the construction of the base. The layout of the complex was circular, like a defensive laager, and the scale was as impressive as the dam itself. This place had been built to last.
So why had it been abandoned?
The whole base was covered with snow, drifts piled over doors and windows. What roads he saw were cracked and blistered, with weeds and flowers and the occasional small tree sprouting to reclaim the land that was rightfully theirs. Windows were mostly broken. No vehicles. No tracks in the snow save his own.
Once he made his way inside, it wasn’t any different. Long hallways and empty offices. They’d packed up the incidentals but left a fair amount of furniture, all of which had suffered from the assault of the elements, summer and winter. But the basic structure of the buildings—thick metal walls—was surprisingly sound. It was composed of a succession of strong points, compartments that could become individual fortresses all their own, almost as if the builders were as worried about an assault from within as from without.
He wandered without obvious direction, trusting his feet and his instincts to lead him. Most of the time he trusted them far more than his intellect. To him, thinking was a liability—took too long, led down too many wrong paths. His body was a much more dependable instrument.
He caught a strange scent but wasn’t worried. It was only a wolf, which seemed as curious about him as he was about the buildings. They stood watching each other from opposite ends of the room for a few moments before the wolf calmly turned tail and padded down a nearby flight of stairs.
Intrigued, Logan followed, into a darkness so complete even his extraordinarily sharp eyes weren’t of much use. He pulled a mini-Maglite out of his jacket pocket, which revealed a large, circular room, as bare and nondescript as everywhere else in the base.
Suddenly the wolf howled, the noise amplified and echoed by the cavernous space. It was a primal sound that went straight to Logan’s back brain, as it was intended to, as it had since men and wolves first shared this wilderness, and he reacted accordingly. He spun into a crouch, ready for a fight, and bared his teeth in a flash of familiar pain as three gleaming metal claws, each as long as his forearm, punched out of the body of his clenched right hand. They made a distinctive snikt sound as they emerged, like a rifle bolt being engaged. They were forged of a metal called adamantium, and they could cut steel as easily as air. The claws had bionic housings built into each forearm; his healing factor handled the wounds they made each time they were used. That same metal was laced through his skeleton, creating an amalgam with his bones that made them virtually unbreakable.
He hadn’t been born this way. Someone had done this to him. His whole life since, the parts he remembered, anyway, had been devoted to finding out who, and why.
The wolf was sitting in another doorway, but as Logan swung his light around he lost all interest in the animal. He crossed to the wall and raised his right hand to chest height. There were three marks in the metal, deep, parallel gashes, as though someone had slashed at the steel.
He placed his fist by the doorjamb. His claws were a perfect fit.
He
had an answer. Once upon a time—a very long time ago—he had been here.
He looked down, but the wolf was gone, with a fast-paced click of claws on concrete to mark its hurried exit to the surface.
With an equally distinctive snakt sound, his claws went away. Reflexively he wiped the little bit of bloody residue from between his knuckles and took one last look around the empty room.
He wasn’t done searching, but he was done here. Time to go home.
Chapter
Two
Against a backdrop of barren, snow-swept rock, a mother wolf faced off against a hunter. She had young to protect and the blood on her muzzle spoke eloquently of her determination and ferocity. The hunter was short by modern standards but powerfully built, wrapped snugly in layers of fur that afforded protection both from the elements and the wolf’s fangs. His low forehead and prominent brow marked him as Neanderthal man. He had a spear in one hand, a club in the other. The sharply pointed stone tip of the spear was likewise flecked with blood. Each combatant had taken the measure of his foe; neither would back down until the other was dead.
It was a typical weekday afternoon at New York’s famed American Museum of Natural History; the bulk of the visitors were schoolchildren on a variety of class trips. A clutch of them were gathered before the diorama, only half-listening to their teacher as they made whispered comments and comparisons between themselves, choosing sides as to who would win this reconstructed fight.
The teacher herself was, in her own way, as striking as the display. It wasn’t just her height, six feet even, or, surprisingly, the dramatic shock of hair that fell straight as a waterfall to the middle of her back, colored so pure an arctic white that it gleamed like silver, providing a stark contrast to her coffee-colored skin. What marked her most was her carriage, a bearing and manner so naturally graceful you couldn’t help but think of her as royalty. She had a beauty that was breathtaking, but remarkably, she didn’t seem to notice. There was no posing to her presentation, no posturing, no flaunting of the gifts nature had so amply bestowed; she was a woman totally at one with herself. She had a ready smile, and although her voice seemed soft, you had the immediate sense that when she spoke every child in her charge would hear her and, more importantly, would listen. And lastly, there were her eyes, which were a rich, cobalt blue, the same as the sky just before it goes purple at sunset. She was a mass of contradictions whose individual elements should all have been at odds with one another; yet, when combined, the end result was the closest thing to perfection that could be imagined.
“Contrary to popular belief,” she said to the children, “Neanderthals are not the direct ancestor of modern-day humans, but rather distant cousins who died out some thirty thousand years ago. . . .”
With a sweep of her hand, which seemed to leave a distinctive puff of breeze in its wake, she ushered her class along to the next diorama, presenting a scene of Cro-Magnon hunters ganging up on a towering woolly mammoth. They’d backed the mammoth into a corner, where it couldn’t easily maneuver. Already a couple of stone-tipped spears were stuck in its flanks; all the men looked poised to hurl more. The mammoth had put up a powerful fight—a couple of hunters lay broken on the snow—but barring a miracle, the giant creature was doomed.
“They were replaced,” the teacher continued, “by a more advanced race called Cro-Magnon man, also known as Homo sapiens, also known as human beings. In other words, children, they were replaced by all of us.
“It was once theorized that Neanderthals were wiped out by years of conflict with these successors, but new evidence found in our own DNA suggests that these two species may have interbred, eventually evolving into modern humanity. In effect, they became us.”
One of her kids, a twelve-year-old named Artie, flashed a smile at a little girl standing nearby. She was with her parents and she didn’t look at all happy. Her dress was stained with ice cream and Kool-Aid, and she was far more interested in getting some more snacks than in looking at boring old statues and such. When Artie smiled, she responded by sticking out her tongue.
He did the same, only his tongue was black and forked like a snake.
The girl stared goggle-eyed for what seemed like forever before jumping back against her mother and, to that woman’s surprise, burying her head against her leg and whining in fright.
“Artie,” the teacher said quietly, looming over him. He tried his best smile; she wasn’t interested. “Not here.”
“I didn’t mean any harm.”
“You scared her.”
“She started it!”
“She’s a little girl, you’re almost a teenager. I expect you to know better.”
“That is so bogus, Miss Munroe.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Hiding what we are.”
“Yes, in a way. But also necessary. That girl doesn’t know you, Artie, or any of the other students in the class. She didn’t react to who you are, but to what she saw. And it was different and it was scary. It’s very easy, almost natural, for people to react to the surface presentation of things; it’s a survival instinct that some believe is hardwired into our genes. It’s why people have problems with different cultures and different faiths and different skin colors and different ways of behavior. What’s ‘same’ is comfortable. What’s different could be a threat.”
“Are we a threat, because we’re mutants?”
“Am I a threat because I’m black? Or that little girl because she’s Hispanic?”
Artie shrugged. “Of course not.”
“Exactly. As Martin Luther King said, we want to be judged, not by the color of our skins—or, in our case, the makeup of our genes—but by the content of our characters. Artie, mutants are only people with some extra, unique genes. We’re still human.”
While she was talking with Artie, the bulk of the class had moved on to the next diorama, and as Ororo Munroe, known to the other teachers as Storm, strode after them she sighed inside that she’d allowed herself to be distracted. This was a presentation she’d wanted to avoid.
Although the museum had been assiduously upgrading its collections over the years, to stay current with advances in the evolutionary and archaeological sciences, this was one of the exhibits that had been left over from the old days. Against a panoramic background of what was meant to be the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa were a succession of mannequins and visual presentations, tracking the development of mankind from the apelike Homo habilius all the way up the evolutionary line to the present day. Along the way, however, there was a diversion to a second grouping of figures, labeled Homo mutantis? Some were based on informed speculation, while others were clearly purest fantasy. But they were all awful to look at.
A few of the younger students, grouped around Jubilation Lee, exchanged some gently rude banter about ancestry and the obvious resemblance between the display figures before them and some of their classmates. Their way of coping was to hurl wisecracks, but a couple of others just stood and stared, making the obvious connection between past and present, the one perhaps being prologue to the other. Mutant powers tended to catalyze at puberty, and while all of them had been cataloged as carriers of the active gene, not all of them had manifested their powers. They were clearly wondering now if they’d end up looking anything like these nightmares.
“The tribe where I used to live called this part of Africa ‘the forge of Heaven,’ ” Storm told them all, standing right before the diorama but staring past the figures, ignoring them in favor of the vista that lay beyond. In her mind’s eye there was no painted backdrop but a stark, sere landscape that stretched far beyond the visible horizon. It was mostly grassland, when there was rain, not much in the way of anything larger like trees. Those were found in the higher elevations, toward Mount Kilimanjaro. “It’s a harsh and unforgiving country where anthropologists believe that life on Earth was born,” she continued. “Only the strongest, the most intelligent, the most worthy of creatures can survive here. That’s n
ature’s way. She tries all sorts of possibilities—dinosaurs great and small, mammals much the same—until she finds a species that works. At the same time, we have to accept that some things . . . don’t.”
“Old news,” Artie said flatly, end of story.
“Precisely,” Storm responded cheerily. “What you see here is our snapshot of the world tens of thousands of years ago. What they were has no more relevance to what you are than that Neanderthal does. What matters is who you choose to be. The kind of person, the kind of life you want to live.
“Come on, class,” she finished, shuffling them along, “let’s go rejoin the others.”
Around the corner, down on the main floor, some older students from Professor Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters were checking out a reconstructed skeleton labeled SABER-TOOTHED TIGER. Their comments were mostly about a notorious mutant who’d adopted the same name and was currently the object of a hugely unsuccessful worldwide manhunt.
The teacher responsible for watching them was only partly paying attention. His eyes and the bulk of his focus were on a slim, striking redhead who stood across the hall. She was a head shorter than he was, which made her about five-foot-seven to his six-plus, with legs that went on forever, a figure to die for, and a face to match. Her eyes were the green of a spring forest and had a sparkle that would put the finest emerald to shame.
His own eyes, she had never seen. He kept them hidden behind specially designed glasses whose lenses were made of a ruby quartz so dense the crystal seemed almost opaque. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure there were proper eyes at all within their sockets anymore, although he had perfect twenty-twenty vision. Instead, there were beams of pure force that Xavier had labeled “optic blasts,” powerful enough to knock a tank end over end or punch holes through mountains. Unlike the others with their powers, Scott Summers had no control over his. He couldn’t shut off his beams; they blasted away 24/7, as they’d done since he was a teenager. Even closing his eyes didn’t help. For some perverse reason, his eyelids—or his hands—were able to block the beams; he couldn’t do damage to himself. But the beams themselves were so powerful they’d take advantage of the slightest gap. A twitch of the eye, the slightest relaxation, meant instant disaster. So, to keep from devastating his surroundings, he had to wear these glasses—or a visor that even allowed him to manipulate the strength of the blasts—constantly.
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