Summer 2006
Colonel Lance Saunders marched up
the hill with the purposeful stride of a man for whom walking was a necessary
irritation, an exorbitant means of getting from A to Z. There was an abstract look on his thin, pale
face as he walked, a look of self-contained disquiet, of endless inner
distress. A slack-faced individual, his
was an expression that lacked any particular age or defining quality, the kind
of countenance one would glance at and forget a split-second later, that of a
man in a perpetual coma. His body was
long and thin and ungainly; his legs moved with an almost lethargic, mechanical
precision. Only his eyes were alive,
darting back and forth, here and there with an alacrity that was quite divorced
from the rest of his ineffectual being.
He moved like a man with a purpose,
and yet possessed the look of a man for whom purpose had long held very little
meaning.
The colonel sighed, irritable and
yet with an undisguised measure of helplessness. There was very little that surprised him
anymore; indeed, over the years there were few things he still regarded with
sympathy. And yet today, for the first time
in many decades he had been shaken to the core, and his expression of preoccupied
abstraction showed it. He crested the
hill with an increasing sense of agitation, his long legs jerking back and
forth with the twitching impression of a nervous tic.
Once at the top he stopped, frowned
morosely, and looked around.
The mansion that had once stood at
1407 Graymalkin Lane was now nothing more than a smoking pile of debris and
rubble, a decrepit skeleton of the magnificent building it had once been. Dusk was drawing on into night; the contorted
husk of the mansion cast gnarled shadows out over the hill in a sinister array
of broken patterns that clawed at the colonel as if onto its final lifeline.
But there was no saving this mansion
now. It had taken many years, but at
last its singular fight was over.
“These Sentinels certainly know how to do their job,”
the colonel murmured wondrously - yet not a little begrudgingly - to himself.
A
little way off, in what appeared to be the gutted shell of a study, a little
pocket of soldiers was bustling around a human-sized bundle lying on the
floor. As soon as the colonel had made
his appearance, one of the men had broken away from the party and had begun to
walk over. When he was within a foot or
so of the colonel, he saluted - which Saunders returned rather half-heartedly -
before addressing his superior in a faintly troubled tone.
“Colonel,
it's a surprise to see you. I thought
--”
“You
thought wrongly,” Saunders retorted tartly, looking the young soldier up and
down with a thinly disguised distaste.
The boy was barely out of his teens, thin and sallow, with an
unsuccessful attempt at dignity flickering unconvincingly over his face.
“I'm
sorry, sir,” the young man replied in an obsequious tone, “it's just that you
said --”
“There's
been a change of plan,” Saunders replied flatly. His eyes danced about with a frenetic
energy that may have been mistaken for nervousness, but was more to do with a
propensity for eagle-eyed attentiveness than anything else. “I take it that is the specimen,” he
spoke, indicating to the human-sized bundle still lying motionlessly on the
study-floor several feet away.
“Yes,
sir,” the young man nodded. “Would you… would you like to take a look?”
Saunders
regarded him a moment. He was still all
but a child, he thought with a cursory stab at sympathy. Nervous, tremulous, and unused to
bloodshed. Several body bags had been
laid out in a neat, orderly row a little way down the hill, which the young man
was very poignantly ignoring. The stench
of blood and burning flesh still permeated the cool night air, but Saunders was
used to it and he didn’t flinch.
“Yes,”
he replied at last, decidedly. “I'd like to.”
The
young cadet led him past a smoking pile of bloodstained rubble and into the
heart of the gutted study. Broken books
still lay scattered about the floor, Nietzche and Jung fanning pages both
battered and bloody; notes on genetics and DNA drifted across the wooden
floorboards like ash, lost tokens of a great professor's remarkable
intellect. His legacy, scattered to the
wind. How ironic, Saunders thought, this time without a trace of
sympathy. Professor Charles Xavier and his great dream, crumbled all to
dust. Oh how the mighty have fallen!
Soldiers
were parting and saluting in the good colonel's wake; he stopped, returned the
greeting, and ordered them to leave with a bored, flippant bark. At last only the young cadet was left,
hovering nearby, obviously uncertain about his own place in the grand scheme of
things. Only when Saunders shot the
young man a meaningful glare did he nod curtly and join his superior beside the
now unattended human-sized bundle on the floor.
He
coughed lightly, awkwardly, a polite preliminary to business-like formality.
“She's
unconscious,” he explained matter-of-factly. “We found her underneath the rubble
just outside the study. One of our men
shot her.”
Saunders looked down.
The woman lying on the pallet was
young - probably not much more than twenty-one.
All vestiges of prettiness had been drained from her pallid, drawn and
bloodstained face; and yet in the delicate nose, in the clear brow, in the
passionate and as yet untested lips there was an underlying prettiness that
already seemed marred by more than mere cuts and bruises. The white streaks that ran through her
cinnamon-coloured hair were caked with blood and dirt. As Saunders gazed down upon her, his face
seemed to flare into activity for a mere split second; his mouth jerked, his
throat tightened, his brow creased, and the agitated eyes grew wider. But it was only for a split second - within a
moment he had become expressionless once more.
“And she hasn't awakened at all?” he asked in the
same, deadpan voice.
“We
don’t expect she will, sir,” the young cadet replied grimly.
The
colonel considered this a moment.
“We
should take her in for tests, just the same,” he returned at last, decidedly.
“After all, with these mutants, it's hard to tell when they're really dead or
not.” He paused, stared up at the young man again with an oddly intent look.
“And Xavier?” he questioned quickly, almost furtively.
“Dead,
sir,” came the indifferent reply.
“And
the others?”
“All
dead, apart from this one.”
A
shadow seemed to cross Saunders' face; he stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“Then
perhaps,” he murmured reflectively, “when and if she wakes, she will wish that
she had followed them.” He did not stop to explain himself, but turned quickly;
the young cadet was suddenly most surprised and a little disturbed to see two
tall and peculiarly silent male paramedics - one tall, blond and lanky, the
other tall, dark and burly - standing dutifully a little way behind the
colonel, both of whom, up until that very moment, he hadn't noticed before.
“Take her,” the colonel ordered them peremptorily.
The
two men moved forward, each at either end of the pallet, and hoisted the woman
up with an easy flick of the arms. The
young cadet looked ruffled.
“But,
sir… I thought I was meant to wait for--”
“This
doesn’t concern the feds,” Saunders replied coldly, as the two men carted the
woman back down the hill. “We've been ordered to take her to a military
hospital. You are relieved of your
post. Get back to barracks and make your
report.”
The
cadet still looked uneasy, but gave a formal salute and shuffled off. Saunders hardly noticed. He was already following the two men back
down the hill with an inscrutable look on his inscrutable face.
*
At the bottom of the hill an
ambulance was already waiting. Saunders
threw open the back doors whilst the two paramedics loaded the young woman
inside and hastily connected her to a drip and a heart monitor with the
practised air of the professional.
Saunders surveyed this all with a stony silence, and when they were
finished, he nodded and curtly addressed the two medics.
“Good work.
Dominic, St. John, get up front and take the wheel. I'll stay with her. You'll need to be fast, my friends, but
please - drive carefully. Our cargo is
precious.”
The
tall, burly man nodded wordlessly.
Saunders stepped up into the recesses of the ambulance, whilst the two
men closed the doors on him, one by one.
Clang.
Saunders
was shut inside with the mutant. The two
medics stared briefly at one another.
“I
still say we shoulda left a traitor like her to rot with the rest of those X-freaks,”
the blond man remarked sulkily in a broad Australian accent. “You think she'll
even make it?”
“She
never will if we don’t start drivin',” the other replied, low and severe. “And
if she doesn’t, its our heads on a freakin' platter, St. John. Get your ass up front. I'll take the wheel.”
So
saying he walked round the ambulance to the driver's seat; St. John grimaced to
no one in particular and gave a mock salute.
“Yes,
sir,” he muttered caustically.
*
The
ambulance started with a jolt; in the back, wires and fixings swung ominously
in the dim half-light that buzzed and flickered mutinously from a single light
fixture above. Saunders was leaning over
the patient with an odd tenderness on his featureless face. It was with a gentleness quite unexpected in
the staunch and severe colonel that he reached out and stroked the girl's
pallid cheek with the back of his wiry hand.
“Welcome
back, my child,” he whispered.
“Let
us only hope that she will return to us,
Raven,” a mild, serene, yet faintly distinguished voice observed from the
corner. Saunders looked up sharply, his
ever-vigilant gaze finally falling on a little old lady sitting quite placidly
in the shadows at the corner of the ambulance.
His face darkened somewhat, his mouth holding the faintest trace of
bitterness.
“How
could it have been allowed to go this far, Irene,” he commented grievously,
“that she was almost killed?! I thought
you'd guaranteed --”
“You
forget, Raven,” the old woman returned, this time gravely. “I make no
guarantees. Time itself cannot allow
guarantees. What matters is that she is
alive. By a thread that may be broken at
any moment, granted - but she is still with us, at the very least.”
She
paused, frowning a little, her face wreathed for the first time in the shadows
of uncertainty as her wrinkled features oscillated under the swinging
light. She was a small, spare woman,
apparently in her sixties, dressed in a plain, old burgundy dress suit with a
prim and fussy lace collar; her grey hair was tied back in a severe bun, and
where the colonel's eyes were constantly active, hers remained blank and
unblinking behind rose-tinted glasses.
“You were right, at least,” he finally replied,
stiffly. “She was there.”
“And
the others are dead,” Irene stated with a tone of resigned yet calm finality.
Saunders'
eyes flickered briefly as he looked on the girl still lying, motionless on the
pallet.
“Yes,”
he answered at last, unwillingly and somewhat petulantly. “Not that I give a shit
about Xavier and those other self-righteous bastards, but…”
“I
said there would be others that would be there,” Irene finished serenely, “and
there weren't.”
This
time the colonel looked up at her, and as he did so, a strange thing happened
to his face - its features, the hunted eyes, the hooked nose, the discontented
mouth - each seemed to shift subtly, melt, and slowly to reform itself, and
then, almost within the blink of an eye, the colonel was gone and replaced with
a woman, a dark-haired woman with skin almost as pale as that of the young girl
lying on the pallet; her eyes were grey and hard, and her mouth almost as
unforgiving as the colonel's had been.
She was beautiful, or had once had been - it was difficult to tell. And though there was barely a wrinkle on her
face, there was the distinct quality of age
about her.
“You
have rarely been wrong before,” this strange woman noted pointedly - her voice
held the glacial tone of an icicle, “and never about something as important as this.”
The
old woman named Irene didn’t seem in the least concerned about the peculiar
transformation Saunders seemed to have undergone. If anything she appeared not to have noticed
it at all.
“In
this game we play, Raven,” she merely murmured softly, “one can never be quite sure just how things are going to turn out.
You and I both know that, my love.”
“You
told me there were supposed to be three of them,” Raven hissed accusingly.
“Where were the others tonight? Why
could we not save them?”
“Perhaps
they have already been saved,” Irene answered evenly. “Only not by us. Always you are too impatient, Raven. Let Time play its hand. No doubt events will unfold as they are meant
to. The other two shall, in time,
return.”
“But
you said we would find the others here, tonight,”
the other retorted accusingly; but Irene merely chuckled softly.
“You
forget, my love, that the future is malleable, that there are certain variables
in this game that my visions cannot take into account. I cannot see with any
distinct clarity the shadows that lurk at the borders of this game, some of
them master manipulators, those that twist events to their own subtle desires -
just as we do.” She paused, a small smile curling the corner of her withered
lips. “At least we found that which we have always treasured most, my love.”
Her eyes shifted blandly, almost imperceptibly behind the dark shades. “At
least we have her.”
Raven's
ravenous eyes fell back to the face of the girl lying, still as unbroken water,
upon the pallet. There was a pendant
round her neck - a butterfly crafted from white gold, its blue and green enamel
wings chapped and dusty. Her brow
furrowed, Raven reached out with a slender, curious hand and touched the small
token, toying with it thoughtfully.
“Yes,”
she finally nodded in muted agreement.
Her eyes became unfocused as she addressed the girl in a mere whisper:
“How long has it been, my child? All
those years of waiting have finally bled into this.” She raised her voice, addressing the little old woman in
bitter tones; “She'll hate us for letting her live, Irene. And she will hate us even more for what we
have planned for her.”
The
old woman's expression was grave.
“It
is her destiny, Raven. It is what we
sought her out for from the very beginning.
And finally all those years of labour are starting to bear fruit.”
Raven's
eyes were suddenly dim.
“Really,
Irene?” she asked quietly, an element of vulnerability suddenly breaking that
indomitable voice.
And
Irene replied: “Really, my love.”
There
was nothing more to be said. Outside the
window the world rushed by, a world as untouchable and invisible to the woman
named Irene as it was to the girl lying beside her on the pallet. Nevertheless, she turned slightly, and it
seemed that for a moment she could see beyond the glass, beyond the sea of
houses and streets and bodies, beyond the impenetrable night and the moon and
the stars, and into something else far, far away.
“That's
right, my young thief,” she whispered to herself. “Run away into the night, and
take your shadow with you. You'll be
back, soon enough. And as for you, my
starchild… the future rushes towards you, and it will always find you, whether
you wish to be found or not.”
* * * * *