He heard something from under the mass of wreckage, where a big ceiling beam seemed to have split and dropped into the middle of the room. Could someone be buried down there ?
He might not have Recall’s mutant power, but Synch’s natural ability did make him, in a sense, an organic mutant detector. He only had to concentrate for a moment to realize that they were both under the debris. Tapping M’s strength, he started throwing wreckage aside, trying not to bring any more of the structure down.
Then, the center of the split beam began to rise. M stood from under the debris, a crushed filing cabinet held over her head, pushing aside wreckage like a vertical bulldozer. The stomach of her uniform had been shredded, which for fabric made of unstable molecules was a pretty good trick.
Banshee lay at her feet, covered with plaster dust, sitting up weakly. He coughed and waved at Synch.
“Could you take this, please?” asked Monet. “I’ve got a stomachache.”
Husk and Chamber ran down the aisle of the amphitheater. They could see the rocket launcher at the far end, mounted on a stage riser. A man saw them coming, and dived for the control box on the floor nearby. Beyond the rocket launcher, Chamber could see the face of George Washington, looking unflinchingly over the barrel of doom, unwilling to lower his eyes even in his last moments.
Chamber was close enough for a psionic blast. The control box exploded in a cloud of reddish plasma, ensuring that no more rockets could be fired. But the first one was already on its way, headed for Washington’s face, symbol of liberty, doomed to look just like Chamber himself.
Rage boiled up inside him, expressed in a scream of psy-chokinetic force. A beam of energy as pure, as fast, and as straight as he had ever produced, lanced out like a laser, catching the rocket in its flight.
The explosion swallowed the great face, obliterated it in a boiling mass of fire and smoke, and Jono thought he had been too late. Then the smoke cleared, clouds parting, and Washington gazed unflinching and undamaged, toward the horizon.
Banshee, still shaken, had his arms draped over M and Synch’s shoulders for support, as he limped toward the parking area. Somewhere, he could hear a car motor racing, and he wondered idly if some of the terrorists were trying to escape. Well, let the police at the roadblock catch them.
He kept his eyes down, trying to watch what his still-numb legs were doing, and probably M and Synch were doing the same. Thus, they didn’t see the terrorist leader until he was standing right in front of them, Genoshan assault combine aimed squarely at them.
Synch groaned. They were none of them in shape to handle this.
The man stood at an odd angle, probably injured when he’d jumped from the window escaping M earlier. His ill-fitting clothes, doubtless intended to make him look like a typical American tourist, were dirty and tom. A trickle of blood escaped the comer of the terrorist’s mouth, but he smiled a gaptoothed smile as he said, “Do not make me use this, please. I Would not hesitate to do so.”
“No doubt,” said Banshee, wearily. He heard the car motor again, louder now.
The terrorist turned, just in time to see the little white sports car shoot up the sidewalk, brakes locked, drifting into a four-wheel spin. The hood struck him sideways, cut his feet out from under him, sent him spinning through the air to lie on the grass in a moaning heap.
Emma climbed up to sit on the back of the driver’s seat and grinned at him. “Did any of you,” she asked, “seriously think I was going to sit out the party?”
Monet sat Jono down safely next to the Xabago. Emma had driven Sean out, using her psychic abilities to make the police ignore them, while Everett and Monet had relayed the rest of the team out of the park. Jono and Angelo had been the last.
Paige was sitting on a stump, still in stony form. Jono walked over. “We were a pretty good team, you and I.”
She glanced up and smiled at him. “Yeah, we usually are.” “We should talk.”
Her marble smile turned nervous and twitchy. “Yeah, we really should.”
Just then, he heard a car approaching rapidly. He tensed until he saw the familiar pink Cadillac shoot around the back of the Xabago and grind to a hall in the gravel. Recall jumped over the door and ran toward them even as the car stopped. He trotted up. “Paige! I thought I’d never find you. We hit the roadblock, and I didn’t know what to think.”
She stood. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
Jono gazed at her questioningly.
She looked embarrassed. “We’d made plans for Recall to meet us here. I’d asked him.” She looked down at her feet. “We had kind of a date.”
Jono said nothing, turning to walk away into the woods. She called his name, but he never looked back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Later this hour, a live report from Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, where state and federal investigators, as well as units of the National Guard, are mopping up in the wake of a startling terrorist takeover of the visitor’s center, and threats to destroy the sculpture. While the World Federalist terrorist organization claimed responsibility for the attack and it is confirmed that members of World Federalists are in custody, WNN has also learned that there were reports of multiple super-powered individuals on the scene during the attack. Some officials are now speculating that the World Federalists may have allied themselves with mutant terrorists, and may have indeed been seeking to create a ‘mutant homeland’ in Florida. We’ll have more on this right after this break.”
—excerpt from WNN news report
Nobody, not even Sean and Emma, had realized just how bad a flap Rushmore had caused until Angelo had spotted the flight of military helicopters coming in. He’d gotten to thirty before he stopped counting: gunships, troop carriers, scouts, the whole deal. Later, on the road, he’d laughingly referred to it as “Black Hills Storm,” and suggested that the President needed a boost in the polls, so he’d decided to invade South Dakota. Nobody laughed.
Angelo’s mood had continued to sour as they traveled the backroads north and east, and he’d watched the scenic Black Hills fade into something as flat as the kitchen floor, and half as interesting. It had taken nearly a day of driving into nowhere to reach what Angelo reckoned must be the middle. There, Emma announced that they were going to stop and lie low for a few days.
Their destination had been the Hilltop Motor Court, a single-story strip motel that looked as though it had been built to attract Model A Fords. If there was a hill, Angelo would have needed a carpenter’s level to find it, and he wondered if the owners had simply bought a used sign somewhere. The manager had been delighted when Emma rented every room in the place for the next week, cash in advance, both to assure their privacy and to buy his silence.
The no vacancy sign had gone on, and stayed on, and the kids had each been given his or her own room. “It will be good for us all to spread out, get some space,” Emma had announced, but Angelo noticed that she still stayed in the relative luxury of her RV. He suspected that she simply wanted the girls out of her hair for a while. The M.O.N.S.T.E.R. guys had tagged along, and Emma had assigned them rooms too. She’d decided that it was too risky for any mutant to be wandering around the countryside.
So, there they were. Angelo hated the place. His air conditioner roared like a dynamo, but barely managed to keep the room below eighty at night, the TV got three ghosty channels in glorious black and white, and the local nightlife consisted of a Dairy Queen and a bar from which country-and-westem music seemed to blare twenty-four hours a day. There was a pool, in the same sense that the Los Angeles River is a river. It was a scratched and faded prefab fiberglass tub just long enough to swim two strokes before hitting the far wall, and since that was impossible to do without hitting Jubilee and her inner tube, and she never seemed to leave, he just didn’t see the point.
Instead, he put on his baggies and shades, sat in a peeling metal lawn chair at the edge of the pool, and sulked. Jubilee paddled in slow circles, which was all there was room to do in th
e tiny pool, her motion echoing those of the turkey vultures that slowly wheeled overhead. “I wonder if they’re for me,” he said to nobody in particular.
There was a squeak that told him somebody had settled into the next chair over. “Ask not for whom the buzzard circles,” said Chill, “he circles for me.”
Surprised, Angelo turned and made eye contact with Chill, finding there a kindred spirit.
“I hate this place,” they both said at once, and then broke into laughter.
“I hate the plains,” Chill explained. “I hate the Midwest. I hate being away from the ocean. I’m a California boy, and I love the beach.”
Angelo raised an eyebrow. “California? No kidding? I’m from California too. What part?’ ’
“San Diego. You?”
“L.A.” He felt his momentary elation fading. “One of your better neighborhoods, where we had the Chicano gangs, the Asian gangs, the black gangs, and white gangs. Your basic United Nations with Glock 17s. About a hundred and twenty miles from your hometown, but I’m betting it was on a whole ’nother planet.”
“You miss home?”
“Nah. Getting out of that ’hood was the best thing I ever did.” '
He grinned tentatively. “Miss the beach?”
Angelo chuckled. “Yeah, I miss the beach. And some of my old buds. And the hills.” He pushed himself up in the chair and looked around. “What the hell keeps the sky from just falling down and crushing this place flat?’ ’
“Maybe,” suggested Chill, “it already did.”
They had a good laugh at that.
“You know, Chill, you aren’t such a bad hombre. You said you hate the Midwest, so why you going to Chicago?”
He leaned back in the chair and sighed. “Summer job. Recall’s family owns a cold-storage warehouse, so I’ll drive a forklift all summer moving crates of fish from one comer to another. It’s not so bad. Pay is okay, and part of my power is that cold doesn’t bother me. I could do it in my Speedos if I wanted.”
“But you hate it.”
“Need the money. My family isn’t rich, and the student loans are piling up. It’s sometimes hard for a mutant to get a job, even when it’s not that obvious. No offense,’’ he added. “None taken. ’Cept, with you, how would they know?” “They figure it out, sooner or later. Maybe they don’t know I’m a mutant, but they know there’s something odd about me. My hands are cold all the time. I don’t get goose bumps when I fetch something from the walk-in freezer, I drink my Slushie way too fast. They find some trumped-up reason to fire me. Always happens/’ He studied Angelo’s face, seemingly looking for a reaction. “You don’t know how it is, do you? Don’t you ever worry about money?”
“Back in the barrio when I was a kid? Every day. But since this—” he gestured at the skin on his arm “—I’ve been at Xavier’s, and Emma pretty well takes care of that.”
“Must be nice.” He actually sounded envious.
Angelo pointed at his face, “You try looking at this in the mirror every day, and tell me how ‘nice’ it is.”
Chill held up his palms apologetically. Angelo could see frost forming there. “Hey, sorry,” Chill said. “I guess sometimes I think about the mutants that have real powers, that things would somehow be better for them. It doesn’t work that way, does it?”
“Nah, guess not. We all got our cross to bear, you know?” They stared silently up at the wheeling buzzards for a while. “I hate this place,” said Chill.
“Me too,” agreed Angelo.
One thing each room in the Hilltop Motor Court did have was a perfectly functional AM radio, and Paige had wasted no time in locating a station that carried Walt Norman. “I want to find out if he says anything about Mt. Rushmore,” she’d told them, and soon all of them, M.O.N.S.T.E.R.s and Xavier students alike, had gathered in Paige’s room to listen to the show. The air conditioner had failed utterly to keep up with all their body heat, so they’d finally given up, opened all the windows, and propped open the door.
They arrayed themselves around the radio as the show started. Angelo draped himself sideways across an armchair and propped his head up with a pillow pilfered from the bed. The program started with the usual Norman monologue, the usual sappy banter with Trent McComb, the usual idiotic jokes with Mrs. Dale. It was just past the first break when he finally got around to Rushmore.
“It’s a shocking thing,” he said, “when such a great symbol of our liberty can be threatened by the very people who abuse that same liberty. And of course, you ’ve all heard the stories about mutants being there. Now mind you, no mutants were captured, only World Federalists who, as far as we know, are as human as you or I. But I have to wonder how you can call somebody human when they have, in fact, sold out the human race.” He laughed. “But they paid the price for trusting mutants. Yes, sir, when things went bad their mutant buddies turned tail and left them behind. All I can say is, thank God for the United States National Guard!”
Paige sat, legs curled up, on the bed, her back against the headboard, her eyes intense. She rocked back and forth, and she was biting her lower lip until it was white, until Angelo thought it might bleed.
“That is such crap,” Angelo said. “That is such utter crap.”
Norman continued. “And this business of ceding Florida to the Cubans, and now we hear talk of a ‘Mutant Homeland, ’ right here inside the borders of the United States of America! I tell you, it just shakes my faith in mankind to see humans, even terrorist humans, buying into such a thing. But then, then something happens to restore that faith. When we have a hero, just a regular guy with no powers, just somebody trying to make a difference, a man like Buford Hollis, aka Razorback, a man who would take a bullet for his President— ’ ’
Angelo snickered. “I heard on the news that he took a bullet in that pig’s head he wears, that’s where he took a bullet.” Norman went on. “—that is when my faith is restored. I just can’t say enough good about this man. ”
Angelo made a raspberry noise. “Hurray for Pigback.” “Razorback,” corrected Everett.
“Whatever.”
Recall, who was sitting on the foot of the bed, shook his head. “This guy is a mutant, right? He has a power, right? I don’t get it. I mean, he saved the President and all, and that’s good, maybe even heroic. But he’s a mutant, and he isn’t telling anyone. The whole world is watching him, and he’s shut up tight as a clam. How brave is that?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Angelo, “like he wants Norman saying he tried to steal flipping Florida too? If I was him, I wouldn’t say anything either.”
Chill looked at him. “I think you would, Angelo. You’re a straight-up guy. You say what’s on your mind, and you don’t care what they think about it. This Razorback guy has a chance to say something and he’s not, and that’s totally bogus.” Angelo thought about it. What would he do if he were in Razorback’s size fifteens? How did he know? “Maybe we should cut old Pigback some slack. Like I said, we all got our crosses to bear. How do we know what his is?’ ’
Jubilee rolled over on the floor and snickered. “Stupid headgear.”
Paige shushed them. She was still listening to Norman.
“We’ve had these reports of mutants at Devils Tower, a national monument, and for all we know they were behind the attempt on the President’s life, and now they want to trade Mt. Rushmore for a mutant homeland. I say, where will it end? / say we give them a homeland, all right—round them up, put them where we can keep an eye on them, keep them out of mischief. What do you think? We '11 be going to the phones in just a few minutes to find out. ’ ’
Paige looked around. “Where’s the cell phone? I’m calling.”
Angelo groaned. Paige was just making herself crazy. “Give it a rest, why don’t you? I mean, what’s the point?” She looked at Jubilee. “Somebody’s got to set the record straight, especially about Rushmore. Where’s the phone?” Jubilee reached into the pocket of her coat, took out the little phone, and flipped it ope
n. “I’m going to call,” she said.
“No, yer not!” Sean stood in the open door, hands on hips, his face a mask of anger. He marched purposefully into the room, stepping over Jubilee and snapping off the radio. “You should not be listening to such rubbish as this, much less thinkin’ about calling this—this—vulture.” He stared at Paige, who slowly folded the phone and put it down, a beaten look on her face. “Paige, you of all people should know better than this.”
“He was talking about us, Sean. Telling lies.”
He seemed moved by the statement. “Aye, lies. Just words, lass, and I’ll wager not the last lie you’ll ever hear said about ye. It’s part of being a mutant.” He marched out of the room, pausing in the doorway. “I’m sorry, lass—” he looked around the room “—all of ye. It’s not fair, but that's just the way it is, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.”
Then he was gone, and he had left the room as silent as the radio.
Jubilee sat in the inner tube, the rubber warm in the summer sun, the water cool underneath her. She splashed some on her chest and neck to keep off the heat and watched butterflies flitting across the parking lot.
The motel manager, a shriveled little man named George, fished dead katydids out of the pool with a net on a long metal pole. He looked at her and scratched the gray whiskers on his unshaved chin. “You kids mutants or something?”
Jubilee didn’t know what to say. Finally she nodded. “That’s all right,” he said. “Used to be a mutant myself.” She just stared at him.
“Got better,” he finally said.
Sitting on a couple of old chairs by the pool, she could see Chill and Angelo, staring silently up at the buzzards wheeling overhead.
“I hate this place,” said Chill.
“I hate this place,” agreed Angelo.
Chill watched as one of the buzzards peeled off from the group and glided away. “I have an idea,” he said suddenly. He leaned over and whispered in Angelo’s ear.
Generation X - Crossroads Page 17
