Sean pushed the doorbell, but Paige couldn’t hear any ring. She was surprised when, only a minute or so later, the door was opened by a smiling young man with pale blue eyes. Those eyes lit with immediate recognition when he spotted Sean. “Mr. Cassidy, I know you from your pictures. We’ve got quite a clipping file here.” He shoved out his hand with a practiced sense of drama that couldn’t be ignored. “I’m the chapter president, Peter B. DeMulder, but everyone calls me Chill. Glad to meet you.”
Chill was an inch taller than Sean, and had a swimmer's slim, athletic build. His short, bristly hair reminded Paige of the way her big brother used to wear his, but while Sam’s was a golden blond, Chill’s was only a few shades away from white, with just a trace of pale yellow.
Sean took Chill’s outstretched hand and seemed a little startled at the touch.
Chill smiled sheepishly. “Sorry about that. Cold hands.
warm heart and all.” He turned to Emma. “And you must be Ms. Frost. I’m honored.”
She took his hand gingerly, but if she experienced anything unusual, she didn’t show it. “Chill.”
His smile ratcheted up another hundred watts or so. “With names like ours, I hope we can be friends.”
Paige expected Emma to brush off what could be taken as open flirting, but after a moment’s pause, she actually cracked a slight smile. Paige had to admit that it was hard not to like the guy. He was so sincere.
Chill scanned the area around the door quickly. He waved them inside. “Let’s get off the doorstep. I can meet the rest of you folks on our way downstairs.” He ushered them all inside. “Welcome to M.O.N.S.T.E.R. house.”
He quickly exchanged greetings and handshakes with the students, starting with Angelo. If he was in the least surprised or bothered by Angelo’s unusual appearance or the feel of the loose, rubbery skin on his hands, Chill gave no sign of showing it. Paige had to admit that it had given even her shivers the first time she’d touched him.
Chill led them through a number of empty rooms, including a huge kitchen at the back of the house, and into what appeared to be a walk-in pantry. A few boxes and canned goods still dotted the expansive white shelves that lined the walls. He pushed against the rear wall, and it swung open with a click, shelves and all.
Beyond it was a small unfurnished lobby, with a cramped, utilitarian elevator and a stairway going down. They took the stairs.
As they descended, the walls changed from painted drywall to some kind of soft material tacked down with a covering of chicken wire. “Soundproofing,” he explained. “Kind of James Bond, I know, but we’re trying to keep a low profile here, and,” he added with a shrug, “you never know what the future will bring.” They passed through another heavy swinging door, and Paige could hear a hint of music. They stepped into a long, narrow space, like a hallway with only two doors, the one they’d come through, and another right in front of them. A smaller stairway led down to the right. “Double walls with an air space between,” said Chill. “More soundproof-
When Chill opened the other door, the music came full force, loud but not overwhelming, along with the sounds of a lot of people moving and talking in a confined space. It smelled like sweat, perfume, fresh popcorn, and fruit punch. Jubilee chirped, “Party! ’Bout time!”
Apparently, the room took up almost all of the basement. It was sparsely furnished with dorm castoffs, couches, unmatched banquet tables, and folding chairs. A deejay played music from a raised platform at one end of the room. In front of him was a small dance floor. Behind him hung a banner featuring a stylized hand with six fingers. Below that, the organization’s name was finally explained in embroidered lettering: MUTANTS ONLY NEED SYMPATHY TOLERANCE AND EQUAL RIGHTS. M.O.N.S.T.E.R.
There were probably fifty people in the room, Paige guessed, some crowded onto the dance floor, others sitting around drinking, snacking, talking, and just hanging out. A few were obviously mutants, but it was hard to tell about the rest. She leaned closer to Chill so she could be heard. “Are these all mutants?”
He shook his head. “Probably a dozen or so of us here. Some of the rest are friends, family, people with mutant ties away from campus, outsiders and outcasts of other stripes, even a few X-groupies—‘genogoths,’ we call them—who like to hang with mutants just because they think it’s cool.”
Paige shuddered as someone with spiked hair and too many facial piercings walk by. “Sounds kind of creepy.”
Chill smiled. “Can be, but most of them are okay. They’re outsiders, too, and outsiders got to hang. Anyway, most of the mutants aren’t exactly X-Men material, me included. I can make a slush ball or two, keep my drinks icy cold, and, if I don’t concentrate, deliver a chilling handshake or literal cold feet.” He chuckled. “Doesn’t do much for my love life, I can tell you.”
He looked out across the dance floor. “That’s the reality of the x-factor gene. Most of the people who have it don’t get world-shaking powers. Some of them get pretty badly messed up.” He glanced at Angelo and Jono. “But I guess you know about that. That’s why M.O.N.S.T.E.R. was founded, to create support and understanding for young mutants.”
Jono scratched his nose. “You must get a lot of understanding down here in the bomb shelter.”
Chill frowned and shrugged. “You know what it’s like out there these days. At least, I guess you do. I keep expecting someday to answer that doorbell and find an armed mob or stormtroopers or Sentinels or God-knows-what waiting for me.” He tilted his head and pursed his lips. “Party over. Game over.”
Jono nodded in understanding.
Chill pulled them over to a circle of overstuffed chairs surrounding an oak coffee table, its surface carved with countless names and dates, “Come on over here. Let me introduce you to my personal posse.”
Two other young men stood up from the chairs to greet them. One looked to be about the same age as Chill and was almost as tall, but he was half again as wide, heavy boned and muscled like a wrestler. His head was either shaved or naturally bald, and his ears stuck out too far, especially at the almost-pointed tips. Potentially, this combination of features could have been pug-ugly, but he had large, expressive brown eyes, a slightly cleft chin, and a matched set of dimples that showed when he smiled. Paige thought he was almost cute, in a very unconventional way.
The other was barely Paige’s height, and looked too young for college. His features were youthful but sculpted, his reddish-blond hair sweeping across his high forehead in bangs. His eyes were dark and intense, but he kept them downcast as though he might be shy.
Chill waved at the big guy. “This is Willy Gillis. We call him Dog Pound. He’s telepathic, but only with animals.” He chuckled. “Tries to psi with a human, he just gives them a splitting headache.”
Dog Pound shuffled in his sizable Nikes and looked uncomfortable. “I'm working on it.”
Chill chuckled. “Pounder would give his right arm for a better mutant power. We can’t convince him we’d like him just as much if he had none at all, or that cute little tail of his.”
Dog Pound shot him a look that could wilt a cactus, but Chill ignored it. Paige caught herself trying to look around Dog Pound’s back. If he had a tail, it was hidden in his pants.
With mutants, you could just never tell when somebody was kidding or not.
He indicated the smaller boy. “And this is my favorite little mutant homework pal, Scooter McCloud, aka ‘Recall,’ boy genius, broadcast major, finder of lost things, the mouse that roared.”
Paige didn’t understand that last until Recall spoke. “Glad to meet you all.”
He didn’t say much, but it was enough. He had one of the most beautiful male voices she’d ever heard, resonant, crisp, penetrating, but warm and comforting as well. It was no wonder he’d gone in for broadcasting.
She looked at him curiously. “You find things?”
Recall flushed a little. He was shy. “That’s my mutant power, really. Helps me do some memory tricks, which is why everyone wants me in their stu
dy group, but I can find lost things—keys, wallets, stuff like that mostly. Comes in handy.”
Paige smiled. “I bet. I’ll look you up next time I misplace my math book.”
Sean cleared his throat. “Chill, Emma and I would like to have a chat with ye, find out for the Professor how the chapter is holding up, see if there’s anything we can do to help.”
He seemed flattered that such important people wanted to have a conference with them. “We’ve got some offices in the sub-basement. It’s quieter there.” He beamed at the students and waved them out into the crowd. ‘ ‘Everybody, relax, mix it up. Food and drink is at the other end of the room, the music is cool, and the dance floor is hot.” He glanced at Jono. “And if it’s more comfortable, lose the scarf. Nobody here will mind.”
Jono raised an eyebrow skeptically, but reached up and pulled his scarf off. A few people looked up as the energy welled up from his chest and face, but immediately went back to what they were doing.
Paige smiled. “Not bad, huh, Jono? I could get used to this place.”
Suddenly a beautiful, towering Amazon, dressed in tight red leather and crowned with a flame-red Mohawk, swooped out of the crowd and planted herself in front of Jono. “Dance, tiger?”
Jono just blinked at her, but she grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the dance floor. After the first few steps, she didn’t have to drag very hard.
Paige watched, mouth hanging open.
Chill shrugged. “Genogoths. Draws them like a magnet. I said nobody’d mind, but I didn’t say nobody would care.” He chuckled, then looked at Emma and Sean. “Let’s go.” He led them back toward the door.
Paige lost sight of Jono in the crowd.
Angelo glanced in the direction of the refreshments. “Hound Dog, let’s go get a brew,”
“That’s Dog Pound,” Pound objected, running his hand over his bald plate, “and they don’t serve alcohol at these things.”
He frowned. “Well, amigo, then lead me to your strongest root beer, the good stuff.” They wandered off.
Jubilee and Everett drifted toward the dance floor, and Monet was standing in front of one of the speakers, rocking to the music, but looking otherwise like she was having one of her periodic zone-outs.
Paige suddenly felt very alone. Then she realized that Recall was standing in front of her. He was blushing again, but he didn’t quite drop his eyes when she looked it him. “Um— want to dance?’ ’
Courage under fire. She liked that, and besides, she was feeling a pang of jealousy over Jono’s genogoth. She managed a lopsided grin and put out her hand. “Sure, why not?”
A brief reconnaissance of the house had revealed an excellent commercial alarm system and, considering the age and dilapidated appearance of the place, surprisingly good locks on all the windows, probably recently installed. Given time and the cover of darkness, Ivan could doubtless have defeated these measures. He had neither.
Instead, he donned the same heating repair coveralls that he’d used as a disguise at the airport, pocketed his false ID, and loaded the bottom tray of his toolbox with surveillance gear. Then he simply rang the doorbell.
The leather-clad teenager who answered the door could have easily played defensive line for any football team in the country. Instead, Ivan suspected, he spent most of his time expanding his extensive tattoo collection and intimidating door-to-door salesmen. The young man listened to Ivan’s story about an annual furnace inspection, scrutinized his ID, and finally showed him around the back of the building to where an outside door led into the furnace room.
Left alone, Ivan quickly discovered that the furnace room had no inside connection to the rest of the house. That left the ducts. Fortunately, Ivan was prepared. He removed a small device equipped with rubber tank treads from his toolbox. The device, known as an infiltrator, looked rather like an especially streamlined toy bulldozer. It was connected to a reel of thin, black-sheathed cable, and the other end of the cable connected to a small control box equipped with a screen and an earphone plug. This item he had not purchased from Radio Shack. Rather, he had sent several thousand dollars to a mail-order catalogue catering to bored executives with fantasies of being super-spies.
Ivan found the switch that turned on the heating system’s blower. It would cover any noise the infiltrator might make. He removed a service panel near the blower and placed the infiltrator inside the duct. A flip of a switch, and the screen came to life on the control box. The infrared camera would allow him to steer the tiny device through the ducts, and a sensitive microphone would conduct even the tiniest sound to his earplug. Now, it was only a matter of placing the microphone somewhere where he might hear something useful.
The office walls were painted white. Brightly colored posters, pictures, and artifacts where everywhere, an obvious effort to make the windowless space less oppressive. Prominent was a poster of the blue-furred mutant Hank McCoy, better known by his public codename, the Beast. Hank, along with Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, had helped form the first M.O.N.S.T.E.R. chapter at Fontane College near Boston while they were both members of the super-team the Defenders, and Hank had directed a portion of the income from his several patents to the support of the organization.
Also centrally displayed was another poster, a blowup of a snapshot, judging from the graininess. It was a portrait of a somber looking young man with long dirty-blond hair and dark wraparound sunglasses. His hand was held near his face in a half-fist. Sean could see that the hand had six fingers. Sean recognized him as Adrian Castorp, the college student whose tragic life story had ended in the founding of the Fontane chapter.
There was no desk in the room, only a table in the comer supporting an aging Circuits Maximus Classic computer. The other furnishings consisted of several locked filing cabinets speckled with decorative magnets and sticky notes, a few battered office chairs, and bookcases filled with titles like Origins of Human Mutation', Inhuman Terror: The Magneto Story, Marvels', The Costumed Vigilantes of New York', and Webs.
Sean settled into one of the chairs and scooted it to turn his back to the wall. Emma settled casually into the other, crossed her legs, and propped an index finger against her cheek.
Chill dropped heavily into a third near the computer, and slid into a comfortable slouch. “You look uncomfortable, Mr. Cassidy.”
Sean feigned a smile he didn’t really feel. “Call me Sean. Aye, there’s something about this place that reminds me of a bunker. No offense.”
Chill smiled a lopsided smile. His eyes took on an age far beyond his youth. “None taken. You feel it because it’s true. Around here, we live each day like it’s our last, because, frankly, we don’t know. Not that we don’t do a lot of serious work here, too, but as we work hard, we also play hard. How much does either of you know about M.O.N.S.T.E.R?”
Emma said nothing and looked slightly troubled. Shortly before the founding of Generation X, Emma had gone through a rather traumatic telepathic occupation of the mind of Bobby Drake. It was possible that she still shared some of his memories, or perhaps she was only feeling an unpleasant sense of deja vu. Telepaths had problems Sean could only begin to imagine.
He turned his attention back to Chill. “To tell ye the truth, I’d not heard of it until Hank and the Professor asked me to look in on you. Hank sends his best wishes, by the way, and says that he hopes to visit personally soon.”
Chill nodded. “To him too. Dr. McCoy is our mentor, and one of our founders. He helped start the first chapter and has continued to act as advisor when his other duties allowed, which hasn’t been often enough.” He sighed and looked up at the Beast’s poster.
“M.O.N.S.T.E.R. was supposed to be a campus support group for mutants, especially those with smaller and less obvious mutations, the people who were too numerous for people like Professor Xavier to help directly. The first chapter was so successful that there were soon more than twenty chapters at schools across North America.
“Then, the mood of the country changed
. One by one, the chapters were closed down, often through fear, intimidation, even sabotage. The Fontane College chapter had to go underground when, six months ago, the chapter house and national headquarters building was firebombed. Burned to the ground, and a lot of people’s hopes with it. All their records were destroyed.
‘ ‘We lost our own status as an official student organization last year, and received our own share of threats. So, we gave up our storefront office and quietly moved into the basement of this abandoned frat house. Things seem safe and secure enough right now, but we’ve given all the ground we can. We’re back up against a cliff edge with nowhere to go but down.”
Sean nodded. He was developing a new respect for this young man. Upstairs, Chill seemed overly friendly, almost frivolous. Sean could see now that some of that was an act, a positive face for the members, people for whom he felt a deep responsibility.
“Hank asked me to tell ye how pleased he is that you’ve been able to hold on. He has hopes that if even one chapter survives, it might be possible to relaunch the national organization at some point.”
Chill laughed reflexively, then stopped himself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that. That would be wonderful, really, but it’s a lot for us to think about right now. It’s all wc can do to keep ourselves going. We can’t even advertise or put up flyers looking for members. We’re totally underground at this point.” He looked up at the poster of Hank for a moment, as though seeking some sort of absolution.
Chill sighed. “You know the genogoths upstairs, how your student said they were creepy? Well, there’s some truth to that, but we’ve become very dependent on them lately. They’re
our eyes and ears. They find new members for us and bring them in. They monitor the street talk, looking for antimutant activity. And when somebody is looking for us, for the wrong reasons, they usually try making contact with the genogoths first.” He tapped his knuckles together nervously. “Sometimes those people get discouraged, have accidents. The genogoths protect us, sometimes not in ways we’d approve of, but perhaps in ways we need.”
Generation X - Crossroads Page 4
