Generation X, page 17
Jonothon Starsmore had heard of D’Spayre, and knew how he had been bested before: against a bright burst of optimism this creature would go down. But Jono had no need for any such bravado. He did not feel the rush that some others felt from wielding their talents, and he had little use for those who enjoyed such things. He was a guy without a face, a throat, a heart, lungs, or anything else down to his thighs. He was held together by the memory of a body projected onto a chamber of roiling unimaginable power. He hated his life and he lived with it anyway.
The only surcease he owned was the knowledge that he could blow it all away if he chose with a rogue burst of psionic power. How could a blast of despair rolling across this nasty forsaken place like a nuclear heat wave do anything to make what passed for his life worse than this? He laughed at D’Spayre. The dour Scot generally did not laugh out loud, especially since he had to go to the trouble to simulate laughter with his psionic voice. But he laughed inwardly, the way a dying man might laugh.
It did not matter where he was, even if he was in the slime-drenched cavern of D’Spayre’s twisted reality. He was already trapped inside himself. He was unlike anyone else, human, mutant, or freak. He had no pride in himself, but no sorrow either. And that made him the perfect opponent to D’Spayre.
Chamber would not surrender to despair in the face of the failure of his power. The demon only huffed larger and stronger with Chamber’s failure. The villain still moved closer. Jono felt no despair because it was an emotion he had long ago dismissed.
Until now. He looked down and saw that the energy of his midsection chamber was gone. It had petered out so profoundly that there was not even enough of it to hold the rest of him together.
What was left of Jonothon Starsmore’s “self” was simply that portion of his head from his nose to his scalp.
It took forever for him to tumble to the ground.
Walter groggily lay under the hefty branches of an elm, with no idea how he got into the biosphere. He saw a scuffle with Chamber caught up in it. Every time Chamber came into view, sliding into and out of Walter’s line of sight as he raced around the dome, he seemed to pop in and out of existence, like a strobe light that shined on him and nothing else. Statis could not figure out what he was fighting, or why.
Then he heard a white pounding in his head that sounded like noise but did not feel like it. Lights flashed from the directions in which Jono ran, jumped, or rode his own heat waves. But unlike the steady flashes you normally saw from Jono, the lights were flickering bands of brightness punctuating the skylit incandescence in the biosphere. Jono’s power, like Jono himself, seemed to be flickering in and out of reality. And the ground rattled when he shifted in and out of phase—on a short delay, the way a clap of thunder follows a bolt of lightning.
So where did he go when he wasn’t here?
Statis moved toward the noise. He saw Jono for a moment beyond the leaves of a thin tree, but then he vanished. Walter went to the spot and saw nothing, but felt an immense static charge in the air.
Walter walked through the airlock of the biosphere and found himself in the chill, brisk air of a New England forest. Although he was bone-tired, having exerted himself to an unreasonable degree, he suddenly felt great. He was sick and dying, but suddenly that was all right. He wondered if there was something wrong with that.
“Hey! Walter!” somebody called from off to the side of the biosphere. Someone behind him gave him a tap on the shoulder.
Walter looked at his shoulder and was alarmed to see the tip of a finger, which then snapped back to the hand it had come from—about twelve or fifteen feet away.
“Walter, you all right, man?” the thin, ashen-faced kid said as he trotted to Walter’s side. The walls of the biosphere clattered with the conflict inside and the ground rumbled below him. Skin stumbled as he ran.
“Oh. Angelo, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m fine. What’s going on?”
“Everett and I sprung you from inside that hellhole. Glad you made it out. He’s up in Sean’s office trying to find out the name of this nut case that’s trying to take down the school.”
“D’Spayre,” Walter said. “He’s called D’Spayre. Heard of him?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. Let’s go tell Synch and see if anyone’s told the database how to take him down.”
^ t
Earthquakes can’t be felt in a moving car unless they are really big, the kind that knock down bridges. Mike Brown did not notice the ground rattling until he stopped his car at the gate leading into Xavier’s School, and thought he felt the engine knocking. He made a note to chew out the guy in the motor pool for watering the high-octane gas with regular until he put a foot on the ground and noticed the vibrations running up his calf. A collection of Federal Express boxes rattled off the edge of the road and gradually settled in the runoff gully covered with traces of remnant snow.
Taking pity on the tumbling boxes, Mike gathered them up and piled them in the trunk of his unit. Then he grabbed the radio receiver. “Unit twenty-two to Dispatch.”
“Dispatch,” the radio said. “Come in unit twenty-two. Over.”
The dispatcher’s voice sounded unusually calm for someone within throwing distance of an earthquake. True, Mike had never been in an earthquake before, but this sure felt like one.
“Do we have any specifications yet on the earthquake in progress? Over.”
A pause.
“Earthquake?” Dispatch asked. “Over.”
“Reporting an earthquake in Snow Valley. Please contact United States Geological Survey in Colorado. Trooper Brown out.”
“Colorado?” the radio said. “Earthquake? There are
no earthquakes in Massachusetts. Mike, are you all right?”
But Mike Brown was now running toward the biosphere.
Mutants meant trouble.
He was conscious. There was no reason Chamber should be alive, let alone conscious, but here he was, lying on the slimy, sticky surface of one of the top ten visions of hell. Over him stood the slime-master himself, D’Spayre.
“Oh, so tasty,” the demon said.
This place seemed more and more like some monster’s foul gullet. Jono’s face lay at a sideways angle to the surface where soft little buds began to rise and contract. In one direction was a tunnel. From the opposite direction, little points of light peeped through the darkness, glowing on and off in irregular patterns.
D’Spayre crouched over Chamber’s discarded legs, which rode the soft surface, spiky buds bobbing up and down underneath them. D’Spayre lifted one of Jono’s legs, ran it under his face, closing his eyes lightly and drinking it in as if it were a Havana cigar.
Then the creature flung the leg toward the maw. It flew in an irregular spiral like a knuckleball. A uvulashaped object snapped down and caught it like a frog snatching a fly out of the air. The leg rolled into the appendage for a moment, then tumbled backward into the darkness.
D’Spayre knelt down to look into the eyes and halfface that remained of Jonothon Starsmore. For a moment, Jono understood the way a bird must feel when a python catches its eye and freezes it in place before striking. Then Jono shook off the hypnotic gaze.
He had no mouth and he needed to scream.
Walter felt good and rather energetic as Skin helped him, hobbling with the Legacy Virus despite his effusive mood, toward the back door of the main school building. “You okay?” Angelo asked.
“Fine, fine,” Waiter said, happily fighting both his rubbery legs and the rumbling Earth to keep his footing. “Fine as kine.”
“Fine as what?”
“Kine.”
Angelo frowned. “What’s that?”
“Cattle. Kine. I think it’s an Irish thing.”
“Oh,” Angelo said. As Walter leaned on his shoulder, he hooked open the screen door with his foot and pulled it open with his free arm.
“Or maybe it’s a rancher thing.”
“Whatever,” said Angelo as he balanced precariously on his remaining leg. “The infirmary ’s right in here if you want to—”
“Somebody’s coming,” Walter said. He felt an approaching electrical aura from the far side of the building before Angelo could hear the tight pattern of running against the quaking ground. Still leaning on Angelo, Walter unloaded a long stream of static charges, which hung on the air like a fence from the far edge of the building to about twenty yards beyond.
Trooper Mike Brown came lumbering around the corner, face-first into the charged air. He got caught in it, seeming to hang in the air like Greg Louganis at the top of the arc of a dive.
The charge in the air dissipated, and the big trooper fell to the ground with a bloody scrape on his nose.
Walter fell backward onto his bony backside. “I guess that wasn’t such a good idea. Are you all right, Officer?” he called to Trooper Brown.
The cop slowly rolled himself onto his back and tasted the blood dripping into the comer of his lips and onto his charcoal gray, pleated uniform trousers. ‘‘Jono called me. I think. Are you two what passes for security in this place?”
“No sir,” Angelo said. “Usually the headmaster takes care of that, but he’s a prisoner of a super-villain right now.”
‘ ‘Then I probably shouldn’t replace these pants just yet, is that what you’re saying?”
Mike got to his feet and gently helped Walter up by the waist. “So tell me, kids,” he asked, “where’s the headmaster and this super-villain?”
Before either could answer, the ground shook like a salt shaker. A deep rumbling came from the side of the building around which Mike had come running. Angelo ran to the corner of the building. Everett slid open the window of Sean’s office and leaned out to see what was going on. Mike scooped up Walter in both arms and slid along the wall with him so they would not fall as the ground shook.
All four saw a big hexagonal section burst straight up from the top of the biosphere. All four shielded their eyes when the pillar of fire followed it.
THE FORMER BIOSPHERE
Now that the prey was driven into an insane rage, the demon was able to feed permanently, increasing his power. Once, D’Spayre had taken unto himself the fury of a single man—a tyrant who had seduced a nation and murdered millions and had felt exultation rather than remorse. The taste of the man’s madness had made D’Spayre larger, stronger, given him a perceptible rush for decades that was so strong he had hibernated for most of that time, assimilating the power. He thirsted for more.
These creatures were delicious. They had brains quite large enough and adaptable enough to overcome any emotional or instinctive response, but they were in a peculiar stage of development where they were either disinclined or unable to make primarily intellectual decisions. From their enslaved masses to their most powerful leaders, they all thought with their endocrine systems rather than their minds. And oh, those minds: so powerful in potential, so aware, so practiced at enduring.
Humans seemed to prefer disaster to serenity, they solicited it so. What a fine symbiotic relationship D’Spayre could foster when he took the essence of Starsmore to himself. He was the natural leader and most powerful of these young ones—who could easily rule this delectable planet with the proper balance of ambition and artifice. They—and even the older ones who oversaw this compound, Frost and Cassidy—would follow this Starsmore to the ends of creation. The remainder of the world would wash up in their wake out of ignorance.
There were others like D’Spayre in the universe. There were not many; such as this demon do not reproduce casually. But this warren of beleaguered souls—so subject to fear, so adaptable to suffering, so inclined to exploitation—this Earth, was D’Spayre’s quiet little secret from them. To rule this world was to feed forever.
Oh, what a luscious planet.
Chamber’s belly was itching. It happened sometimes— a phantom pain also common to amputees—so that didn’t bother him. But his toes itched as well. Not a phantom pain, he knew those. This was a genuine itch.
But his toes, along with the rest of his body from the lower end of his chamber downward, had been unceremoniously tossed aside by D’Spayre. So how could they itch?
Answer: Jono’s brain stem had not been disconnected from the rest of what passed for his body. It was still rooted firmly in a pool of bionuclear psionic soup no matter what lies this inter-dimensional illusionist planted in his brain.
So, he thought, if I’m whole and not lying here in pieces on a great sucking tongue, the next logical step is to blow the dump’s doors off.
So he did.
To his surprise and delight, the next thing Jonothon saw was the flash of his bionuclear blast. Then Jono saw the demon’s mouth turn to shards of demon jaw. The concussion of Jono’s blast hurled the creature up above his head.
Jono’s body returned to normal, for him. The lower half of his head was composed of that bionuclear soup again, but he was used to that. His legs were under his torso where they belonged, as was the rest of him. The grisly gullet faded off Jono’s world like strips of crepe paper the day after Halloween. He was in the biosphere. He had never left it.
A shock wave lifted D’Spayre away from him. In the path of that expanding shock wave, Paige, Monet, Emma, Sean, Penance, and Jubilee hung from trees.
Oh hell, he thought.
He looked up at the roof of the biosphere in that instant that D’Spayre was riding, in pieces, the psionic flume. He realized that the explosion carrying the demon would blow the biosphere to pieces. But first it would curve against the interlocking surfaces of the structure, ricochet in all directions, and thus decimate everything and everyone inside the dome. Then it would blow open a panel somewhere in the surface and fling its energy off into the local environment.
His problems, then, were twofold. First, the contents of the interior of the biosphere would be decimated, including his teachers, his classmates, and himself. Secondly, this nuclear energy would then be released into a local environment that included two small mountain ranges, several river valleys, hundreds of contained and interlocking ecosystems, an extensive groundwater supply, a small but heavily populated state, and the eastern
THE FORMER BIOSPHERE
segment of a large and even more heavily populated one.
This was unacceptable. That was why, in that instant before the explosion, Chamber decided that he was going to die.
From the deepest recess of his soul, Jonothon Starsmore visualized his power. In his mind, he saw a beam of contained and controlled bionuclear energy shooting up from his gut to the topmost hexagon of the biosphere structure. It would form a tube of energy surrounding the wild burst that was vaporizing the demon D’Spayre and, unchecked, would flatten the Berkshire Hills.
Maybe Jono could make this vision a reality, but who knew how the blast he gave D’Spayre had damaged him? What would be left of him now?
He assumed there would be nothing.
There was only one way to find out.
The power poured out of him, and it came in the shape, not of a cylinder, but of a funnel. It was an enormous fusion firebreak, scooping upward and containing everything Jono had unleashed, and all the demons he had contained. Before it burst through the walls of the biosphere, the top end narrowed so that it was indeed a cylinder. The piston of force propelled forward.
Jono realized that he had not unleashed this power— rather, he was this power. His being was scooped up in the wild ride of nuclear force. It was Jono himself who rode upward crashing through the topmost hexagon of the dome and, for all his restraint, vaporizing it and everything it touched.
The light was blinding, the noise, disorienting. He
knew nonetheless where he was and what he was doing, and despite his power, he was burning himself.
On the edge of space, Chamber stopped his ascent. The chaotic energy that had been the demon D’Spayre spewed out of the cylinder of containment and into the vast nothingness, off the blunt northern peak of the solar system. Every atom, every quark that had once been the corporeal form of D’Spayre would occupy a separate parsec of the void. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men would find it easier to reassemble a beam of light into a tungsten filament than to put this demon back together again.
Everett vaulted off the windowsill of Sean’s office, tucked and rolled as he hit the ground, and came up in a run toward the erupting biosphere.
Angelo took off as soon as he heard the sound, not missing a beat as Everett landed running not three steps in front of him.
Trooper Brown gently set Walter down against the wall of the building by a comer to shield him from the blast, and he lit out, unholstering Ms weapon as he did so.
Walter, however, would not be left out of action so easily. Though unable to stand, he could still fire a charge. An electrostatic arc shot from Walter’s fingers, enveloping the cop, Skin, and Synch. It would not keep out everything, but it would effectively discourage the passage of high-level nuclear particles.
But with the electric “sac” he covered Everett with,
he caught the slightest frisson of energy returned along the electrostatic arc: Everett’s wave of synchronicity.
The interlocking frame of the structure conducted the fire of the nuclear blast that flew cleanly out the topmost hexagonal panel of the biosphere. What remained first glowed red, then white, then darkened to black, then sagged, then was ash. Hundreds of delicate forms of plant life were suddenly introduced to the vagaries of the elements in a New England springtime.
The wave of heat flew up like a comet to the edge of space. Emma, Sean, Jubilee, Paige, Penance, and Monet were caught in its tail. They all became entangled in the trees—except for Sean and Jubilee, who shot past the treeline and catapulted into the air.
