X-Calibre Trilogy: Long Hard Road Out of Hell

“Sleeping outside?” I sat down in the grass near him. He glowered at me before looking back up at the sky.

“Do you understand why I hate people?”

“They won’t all be that bad—“

“Nein.” Nightcrawler stretched out on the ground. “They’ll be worse. Ignorance, arrogance, and hypocrisy all run rampant within humanity.”

I sighed and plucked a blade of grass. He had every right to feel put out – I’d be pissed off too if my reward for helping someone live was to be mocked behind my back and called a demon to my face.

“I’m not doing it again. We travel alone from now on.”

I pulled my coat around myself as the wind picked up again. He said “we” . . . that meant he still intended to drag me along. Oh well, it’s not like there was anything left for me out here.

“Do you miss it?” I asked.

“Miss what?”

“Your home, your family . . . do you miss it?”

He thought about it for a minute, his tail tapping the ground. “It was more familiar,” he said at last. “The entire planet was like a demilitarized zone, but I knew the parts I traveled in like the back of my hand.”

“What about your family?” I laid down and studied the stars with him.

“Not much to miss. My mother, that’s about it, but we parted thinking we’d both be dead at the end of the day, so it’s not a big shock. My father wasn’t much of a family man and I only really knew him later on as an adult, when I joined the same resistance he was in. I was an only child.” He looked over at me, eyes glowing in the moonlight. “What about you? Do you miss your family?”

“I do sometimes. My parents were killed in an uprising a few years ago. They came through the ghettos to cull out the weaker of us – weak people don’t make good slaves – and they fought back.” I sighed as the memory re-played itself. “I’m the youngest, and I was the only one left. My sister was caught running papers and hanged. My brother had taken his wife through the Underground years before, but we never heard from him again. So there I was, tucked up in a cupboard while my parents were murdered. I joined the Underground after that – what else did I have to lose?”

Silence settled a for for a few minutes. It was more serene this time, which logic dictated should be odd. I didn’t care, though; crickets chirped as clouds passed by to play peek-a-boo with the stars.

“I have something to ask, but it may offend you,” Nightcrawler’s voice was without the edge it had carried since I met him.

“What is it?” I asked in a similarly subdued tone.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m curious. Where I’m from, the second Great War ended in the Nazi’s defeat and the Allies went in to liberate the concentration camps. The Jewish survivors, it is said, could be divided into two basic mentalities – God does not exist because He would never let his Chosen People become so decimated; or God does exist but is crazy.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot. I think about it sometimes late at night as I’m going to sleep,” I felt my eyes tear up. “And I . . . I’m not sure. I want to believe He exists and cares, but there’s no evidence for that. I can’t quite believe there is no creator, either. I think about all the complexities of everything—“

“Such as?”

“—such as snowflake formation and cellular reproduction and the Fibonacci sequence on pinecones and it seems preposterous that all of it is completely random. Someone had to lay the ground rules. I think that’s all God really is.”

“A divine architect?”

“More or less. Someone who said ‘This is the speed of light’ and ‘This is the equation for gravity’ and built the universe just to see what would happen. I don’t think God pays attention to individuals or cares about our annihilation.”

“Do you pray, then?”

“Sometimes,” I sighed again. “Couldn’t hurt.” I looked over; he was laying down now with his eyes closed. “And you? What do you think?”

“I’m agnostic. I don’t know if God exists and I don’t often care.”

We were quiet again and I let it be. A few moments later I detected the change in his breathing and realized he was asleep. I followed his example.

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We traveled through the countryside by night, hiding out and sleeping in the daylight hours. As we went along we compared notes on where we were from – the fact that this city stood while that one did not, how our histories diverged after Hitler’s bid for power, why his world had Mutants and mine did not. The more we talked, the more at ease we became with each other. It became easier to see past his extraordinary appearance and what I found underneath was someone not too different from myself. The only real difference was that I think he had more hope than I did that his actions in his resistance back home meant something in the long run. He was in his 20s but could remember his world before the power-hungry Darwinistic overlord Apocalypse won the genetic civil war he’d ignited. He remembered growing up in rural Germany with his mother before the bombs had fallen to destroy the landscape; he remembered climbing trees that had birds singing in them and hunting for small game.

We were enjoying the products of his skills as a hunter now that dusk had fallen. I took the joint of rabbit leg from him with eager anticipation; it smelled wonderful and I was quite hungry. We ate in companionable silence and took turns with the bottle of beer I’d managed to pilfer in the last town.

“I can’t remember the last time I had some of this,” he’d grinned and took another swallow. “I must have been about twelve . . .”

“You said before that both your parents were mutants too. Were they also able to teleport?” I speared a potato out of the embers and set it in the grass next to me to cool a bit.

“No, they couldn’t. My mother was a shape-shifter. She could make herself look and sound like anyone she’d ever had contact with. Came in quite handy when running from the authorities – they tend to notice blue skin and yellow eyes.”

“You favor your mom, then.”

“Mostly. The fur was from my dad, though. He was what we termed a feral Mutant – animal-like. He called himself Sabretooth because of his size and feline qualities. If he were with us, we’d be eating deer right now. I remember him heading into the woods, catching the scent of whatever he wanted for dinner, and slaughtering it with his bare hands.”

I winced as I cut open the potato. “I’m guessing he wasn’t someone you wanted to run up against in a fight.”

“Nein, not at all. He was a little on the crazy side, so that really made him dangerous.” Nightcrawler procured a potato of his own.

“How was he crazy?”

He unbuckled his plate armor and pulled up his shirt so I could see his stomach and ribs. “Do you see the scars here?”

I had to move closer to see them through the dim light and dark fur. “Uh-huh.”

“Courtesy of my old man,” he lowered the shirt. “I was about eleven years old then. My mom was teaching me to use my swords, how to take a man down, that sort of thing. She saw the war coming and wanted me to be prepared.” He was absently refastening the armor now. “Well, she goes into town for something one day and dad decides it’s time to toughen me up a bit. ‘Yer gonna be in trouble if ya can’t do that covert crap yer mom’s fillin’ yer head with,’ he growled. ‘Whatcha gonna do if yer caught in a room with someone like me?’ Then he took a swipe at me with his claws.” He mimicked a slashing, grabbing kind of motion with his hands. “Caught me in the side and I started bleeding. He came at me again, told me to fight back if I could. I tried it and got another good slice. I was pretty agile, but I was also smaller then. And my dad was huge and fast on his feet too. I couldn’t outrun him.”

“What happened?” my eyes were wide as I pictured the scene he was describing, my food forgotten for the moment.

“After a few minutes of this I was pretty bloody and in a lot of pain. I was also very scared, because I thought he meant to kill me. It wasn’t just his appearance that made him feline; he liked to play with his kills before he finished the job the way a cat plays with a mouse. Well, he got me backed into a corner of the living room and was coming in for another slash when I looked up to the ceiling and wished I could get there somehow. It would have bought me a few minutes at least and I wasn’t sure he could climb up there to get me. And all of a sudden I was there. I didn’t know how, but I was. At that moment my mom gets back. As she’s opening the door she sees me hanging from the rafters. She sees dad standing under me, grinning like a lunatic and licking my blood off his fingers. And she hears him taunt, ‘What the matter? Don’t feel like playin’?’”

I shivered and forced my mouth closed. “Oh my God. What did your mom do??”

“She threw him out.” He smiled slightly and cut open his potato. “He got his point across though, and once I realized that teleporting was my Mutant ability I became very creative in how I used it. Can you imagine the surprise on someone’s face when they throw you and you’re able to come back behind them and knock them down using that momentum?”

“That’s creative,” I conceded. “So’s getting rid of body parts.”

He nodded. “My mom’s modus operandi was to strike from shadows and disappear back into them. She disliked direct confrontation with her enemies. My dad was the exact opposite; his day wasn’t complete unless he watched the person die in front of him. I favor my mother’s ideas more because it’s easier – I can’t change the way I look as she could – but using what is essentially a defensive mutation offensively has proven quite useful over the years.”

We finished eating, destroyed all traces of our camp, and set off once more. Despite myself I kept stealing glances at him as we walked and he caught me at it a few times, which made me flush red every time. I felt like a stupid little girl when he finally fixed me with an amused stare until I looked away yet again; he shook his head in my peripheral vision and kept moving.