X-Calibre Trilogy: Long Hard Road Out of Hell

“Sleeping outside?”

Some of the anger returned and I slid my eyes open to glare at her. Hadn’t that been obvious before? And why the Hell was she out here, anyway?

“Do you understand why I hate people?” I asked instead of answering her question.

“They won’t all be that bad—“

“No,” I cut her off, not wanting to hear any apologetics for anyone. “They’ll be worse. Ignorance, arrogance, and hypocrisy all run rampant within humanity.” I stretched out on my cleared patch of ground to look up at the stars. My eyes slid over to her and I saw her toying nervously with the grass, more so when I confirmed that she and I would be traveling without anyone else for the rest of the journey. I realized I had been harsher with her than she deserved – she had come to my defense after all. Why, I had no idea, but she had all the same. Then something occurred to me – America was a huge continent. We’d be together a long time, and I hated it when people were consistently scared of me. I should try to establish some kind of working relationship with her, something that would be tolerable to us both as we made our way north . . .

“Do you miss it?”

Eh? Miss what?

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

I hadn’t really spoken to her beyond the logistics of getting all those ungrateful people here, but I had mentioned when she’d asked once, trying to be conversational, that I wasn’t from Here. I wondered if she realized yet that I was from off-planet and took a while formulating a response to her question. I both missed my home world and was grateful to be off the dying rock, all at the same time. I missed what was familiar, but I hated that it had become familiar. This place was new and, quite frankly, exciting to me even without the Nazis. I never thought I would see so much life outside of Avalon again, and I really liked that if nothing else, this place was fresh and clean and nearly pollution-free. I didn’t tell her all that, though. I simply said that home had been familiar and left it at that. Then she asked about my family and cleared away a spot of her own to lie down on. I felt my stomach churn a little; if I hadn’t known better I might have wondered if she could read my thoughts or emotions. But she looked quite innocent and genuinely interested – she wasn’t asking to be cruel but to truly hear the answer. So I told her the truth, that Mom was who I missed the most because I hadn’t known Dad that well, and there were no siblings to mourn. She didn’t pry any further and I liked that; she only made a soft thoughtful noise and watched the clouds move across the sky. I asked quietly about her own situation as much to learn more as to show that I wasn’t a complete asshole all the time.

I was surprised at the matter-of-fact way she described the splintering and slaughter of her family. It sounded like she’d had enough time to come to grips with what had happened but still, what had happened to her was tragic. She earned a measure of my grudging respect after I realized she’d made herself hard because of it. I’d helped ensure we didn’t encounter any more police after Charleston so I didn’t yet have a good idea what life was like for the persecuted people here; after hearing her describe her parents’ murders and what happened to her brother and sister I realized that as young as she must have been at the time she’d known she’d have to get tough or die. I smiled a little as I remembered the way she’d drawn the gun on me earlier, as though fully prepared to take my life if I didn’t leave her alone. Then something seemingly unrelated occurred to me. The girl was Jewish; that had been obvious from the way she automatically mumbled a little something in Hebrew over her food every day. I realized belatedly that hers was a very Jewish name – I couldn’t recall anyone being named that who wasn’t. Then something else occurred to me and the more I dwelled on it the more curious I became. As a kid Dad and I had talked about World War Two and the things he’d seen there; later, before I became jaded with the X-Men, Magnus and I had discussed his experiences during that time as well. In my world there had been liberations; here there had not. Based on what she’d said about Jewish slavery, there had merely been a change in policy. It made me wonder if she prayed over her food merely because she’d been taught to do so as a child, or because she really had faith; I asked carefully if she believed in God.

She seemed torn on that. She actually sounded like she was going to cry as she answered and I cringed inwardly. I hadn’t intended to get that kind of reaction, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do if she actually started to cry. Fortunately she didn’t, just went on to explain that she thought of God as a cosmic engineer and not much else. It was a concept that made sense, especially in light of the M’Kraan Crystal. I was hard-pressed to believe that that thing had come together completely on its own somehowen sen she asked if I believed in God and I answered truthfully – that I couldn’t prove or disprove its existence, and for the most part I didn’t care. The way I figured it, if it didn’t exist there was no point concerning myself over it and if it did, it hadnone one much for me and I was fine staying out of its way.

We were quiet again after that and I let it be, choosing instead to close my eyes and meditate some more. She huddled up in her jacket and fell asleep; I’d have to get us some camping equipment soon, as the weather was still cold and sooner or later it would start raining. I’d take care of that later this evening . . . I yawned and let myself fall asleep.

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“Are you ? I ? I can carry more than this . . .”

“Trust me, I’m stronger than I look,” I hefted the hiking rucksack up and over my shoulders. “Besides, your center of gravity will be too far off if you carry much more.” I held out my hand and she took it, already getting used to my teleporting. I bamfed us out of the shop and onto the street, took a look around, and took us outside of town so we could begin our travels.

“Is that part of your mutation?”

“What?” I glanced over at her.

“Your strength,” she blushed a little. “I figure the – what did you call it again?”

“The teleporting?”

“Yes, the teleporting,” she nodded her head. “I figured that was. What about your strength?”

“Partially,” I shrugged and took a deep breath. I still couldn’t get over how clean the air was here! “All of my training undoubtedly helped build it up, though.”

“What kind of training?” She looked over and up at me, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.

“I wasn’t the only Mutant back home,” I started softly. “There were a lot of us. Some of us did terrible things though, and the others of us decided to fight back for those who couldn’t. Each Mutant had their own power or combination of powers, so we had to be y foy for just about anything. We learned how to fight, how to push our powers to their limits, how to strengthen our bodies. Several of our enemies had super-human strength, so we had to compensate for that somehow.” I recalled one of my more humorous training exercises and stifled a laugh.

“What?” Miriam smiled at me as she watched me snicker.

“There was one man there when I first joined, called himself Weapon X. His skeleton was coated in a very heavy metal, so he weighed a lot more than he should have. Something like one hundred and sixty kilos with the metal and muscle mass. And he was only a little taller than you.”

“Wow,” her eyes widened.

“I bench pressed him on a dare once,” I laughed. “He almost killed me after I let him down, but it was worth it.”

She erupted into giggles, her tiny hands covering her mouth. “How did he try to kill you? What was his power?”

“His powers were regeneration and heightened senses, like an animal’s. But he had these claws that came out of his hands—“ I lightly touched her between her knuckles to show her, “—and he tried to make barbecue out of me with them. I don’t think I ever teleported so far so fast in my entire life.”

She giggled again, once more smothering them behind her hands. After she calmed down she asked me what other sorts of powers there had been and I listed off several – flight, metamorphosis, longevity, concussive eye blasts, mind control, time manipulation . . . She seemed to accept everything I said as truth and asked if I had any idea why her world didn’t have such people in it.

“I don’t know,” I frowned a little as I thought about it. “The one environmental factor I notice is how clean everything is here. There is very little pollution in the air and water.”

“Your home wasn’t like this?” She tilted her head, as though that were hard to believe.

“Not at all,” I sighed. “Even before Apocalypse took over there was a lot of pollution. Some places were worse than others, but every major city had its problems. Induslizalization had made it so that the air was always dirty and many bodies of water were unclean. Things were so bad in places that you couldn’t eat anything that grew in the rivers or the ground.”

“That’s horrible!” she gasped. “Apocalypse made that worse?”

“Ja, he did. The war was terrible. He bombed and burned indiscriminately to make the Humans capitulate, and when it was over there was no going back. The land, in general, was so leeched of nutrients that nothing would grow. The sky hadome ome black; even after years passed, the constant cloud cover was entirely dark. Broad daylight meant that the shadows everywhere weren’t as dark as at night. And when it rained . . .” I made a face. “Disgusting. On bad days the acid was so bad that it could burn your skin, and even after a light shower the evaporating water smelled like sewage.”

“Eew!” She looked horrified at my description, almost to the point that she might vomit. “And that caused all the mutations?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “There had always been Mutants in my world, though. Apocalypse was the oldest we knew of – if he could be believed, he was older than the Egyptian pyramids. But it wasn’t until after World War Two that there were enough of us to come to public attention. The conflict seemed to have given rise to an explosion of us, it seemed, and in the years after the Genetic Civil War erupted there was a huge jump in the number of reported Mutants. The powers got stronger too, or were developed more in clusters. We always figured it was to compensate for the rest of the world.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was harder to survive,” I extended a hand to help her over some rocks in our path. “Evolution is designed so that the strong survive and live on; with the world more dangerous from other people and from the hostile environment, it made a sort of sense that more and stronger Mutants were being born.”

“I suppose that does make sense,” she mused quietly. “But this world is very dangerous too. Hm, it’s all very odd.”

I nodded my agreement. Then we traded off with me asking questions about the history of her world and how Hitler had won the War. Whereas in my world he had gone crazy and stopped listening to his advisors, he had remained relatively sane here (well, as sane as one could be when obsessed with genocide) and considered all of the advice given to him. His scientists had developed nuclear arms that could be delivered remotely while the Allies were still making ones that had to be flown over and dropped; he had succeeded in creating the jet engine before the other side had finished it. Somewhere along the way he’d gotten the idea to make slaves of those he’d previously been bent on killing and that freed up more people to overwhelm the enemy. It was because of this that the D-Day invasion had been thwarted, the British Isles invaded, and the Middle East overtaken. Canada was still a British holding at the time, and after Britain had fallen they’d invaded and secuCanaCanada. Arrangements were made with Mexico as well, and America was effectively surrounded. Between the complete embargo on food, oil, and everything else and the well-placed nuclear devices that leveled New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Detroit, the Americans had no choice but to surrender. The wowas was a mess after that and Hitler, after seeing the extensive damage the nuclear bomb had caused, decreed that extensive measures would be taken to clean things up and keep them nice. The following boom in industrialization was done with the goal of clean productivity – little or no pollution, strict environmental controls, and severe penalties for those who broke the laws. After a time it became unthinkable to pollute the Reich, as doing so would harm the still-important policies of eugenics that Hitler passed into law. Genetic research boomed in the post-war years and citizens actually had to be licensed to have children. If genetic history or testing indicated that deformities, diseases, or generally unwanted traits would be passed down, the penalty was death for par parents and children if a family were started.

The cultural differences were astonishing, and I noticed them more as we passed more and more cities on our way. The revolutions of the 1960’s had never happened and so women were still confined to the home for the most part. Single women were allowed to work in a limited number of approved industries – all hem hem “women’s work” such as food service, clothing manufacture, and child care. Once married, however, it was illegal for a healthy woman to work outside the home. The prevailing rationale was that she should be taking care of the house and breeding children while the men worked. However, because of the emphasis on the home, citizens were encouraged to marry for love as well as genetic integrity, and the divorce rate was exceedingly low. Women could not divorce their husbands unless he was proven to beat the wife or children so badly that permanent damage occurred, or if he was shown to have extramarital affairs with his genetic inferiors. Marital infidelity in general for men was not a grounds for divorce but rather was encouraged; but if a woman cheated on her husband, she was able to be divorced and imprisoned even if the other man were genetically approved. If a man was proved to have committed actions that warranted the wife divorcing him, he too was thrown in prison. As far as the civil rights movement went, that also was non-existent here. Anyone with a naturally higher melanin density was lumped into the same category as the Jews, gays, and revolutionaries: slaves at best, dead at worst. Anyone subject to slavery was not allowed citizenship under any circumstances and were not licensed to breed with the Aryans. Audits were done quarterly – not censuses, mind you, but audits – of the ghettos where the non-citizens lived to determine the population rate and general health of the community. Miriam, like many other Jewish children, had been given her tattooed star as an infant without regard for whether or not the dye used would be harmful to her development. Revolutionaries, I learned, were marked with a crossed out swastika in the same place, gays who were discovered were marked with a triangle, and “coloreds” were considered to be born with their marks.

Another cultural anomaly I picked up on was the music. Rock and roll, having its roots in black music, was not permitted to evolve because it was considered immoral and it died after the War. Elvis Presley had actually been killed on live television to get that point across without question. Other musical styles that had been considered revolutionary in nature such as swing and jazz were similarly outlawed. The penalty for owning any of that music was death regardless of citizenship status because it was considered so subversive. Things hadn’t evolved much beyond big band and the crooners; the more traditional German styles prevailed for the most part and I was disappointed with that. I tried to explain what the music I’d been accustomed to sounded like but couldn’t do it justice. Miriam had simply never heard electric guitars or synthesizers, so she wouldn’t ever know the true sound of it. The best I could do was sing the melodies to her. I was busy coming up with different songs to share around the campfire as I cooked some rabbit one evening. She was particularly impressed with Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and asked me what had been going on at the time that such a song was necessary.

“We went to war with Vietnam,” I explained as I skinned our food. “No one except the politicians really wanted to go, and as the years passed and thousands of young men died the public sentiment became one of outrage. There were protests and the police became the enemy. The popular music of the time was used as a rallying tool for change; some of it was even in code to keep the artists from being arrested.”

“What kind of codes?” Miriam leaned forward, completely engrossed with what I was telling her.

“There was one called Mister Tambourine Man that was about dealing drugs and addiction.” I cleared my throat and sang the chorus for her, “Hey Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I am going to; hey Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me, in the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you.”

“That’s about drugs?”

“Mm-hm. Jingle jangle,” I mimicked a severe case of the shakes. “Get it?”

She laughed shortly and nodded. “The Tambourine Man is the dealer, then. That’s clever.”

“Ach, I really wish I could play some of these for you. The same man who did Mister Tambourine Man did another one called All Along the Watchtower, and someone else made an excellent cover of it. It’s one of my favorite songs because it feels like my entire life told in three verses,” I confided.

“How does that one go?”

“There must be some kind of way out of here said the Joker to the Thief,” I began skewering the first rabbit. “There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. Business men they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth. None of them along the line know what any of it is worth . . .” I nodded to the beat as I sang, imagining the wailing of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. “No reason to get excited, the Thief he kindly spoke. There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” I set the rabbits above the fire to cook and watched Miriam as I finished the song. “All along the watchtower princes kept the view while all the women came and went, barefoot servants too. Outside in the cold distance a wildcat did growl. Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl . . .” I trailed off and explained that the music carried the rest of the song after the last words.

“I wish I could hear that one, too. The words alone gave me gooseflesh,” she rubbed along her arms. “It’s a great metaphor, though.”

“Oh yeah?” I smiled, wanting to hear her interpretation.

“Mm-hm. The Joker and Thief are outcasts, right? Two people who are confused about why the rest of the world can’t seem to see the same values they do . . .”

I nodded for her to continue as I prepared some potatoes for roasting.

“And the castle they’re riding towards represents the government, I guess. The general established order of things. Anyway, so they’re riding to the castle and people are up on the watchtower to keep an eye out for the revolutionaries who want to bring change. They’re a threat, that’s why they’re waiting on the watchtower and not at the doors.”

I raised an eyebrow and asked her to explain; that she’d picked up on those subtle nuances after hearing the words only once reinforced my growing respect for her intellect. I loved talking to her because of this sort or thing, and it had been so long since I’d had someone to really talk to since Ororo . . .

“Well, yeah. The whole song builds up to a conflict that we don’t see or hear the outcome of. They’re riding over to start the conflict because someone has to, and the princes are on the watchtower to shoot them down when they get close enough to start changing things.” She stopped her line of thought and stared at me. “Hey, you okay?”

“Just something that occurred to me for the first time, that’s all,” I shook my head and explained a bit more of my world’s history – in particular the assassinations of JFK in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965. “They could have been the Joker and the Thief, actually; the song was written in ’68. And I don’t know if it was before or after the song was published, but also in ’68 another ‘rider’ for civil rights was assassinated.”

“Ooh. Social relevance and emotional appeal in one tidy package.” Miriam blinked at me, tilting her head to the side. “And you were around for those things. Wow.”

“No, I wasn’t,” I waved that away, smiling. “I’m not that old.”

Her face scrunched up in confusion. “But you said before – when those assholes were talking about you –“

I started to laugh. “I’m not nearly that old! They didn’t know better and I wanted to scare them. No, I was born after those things happened, in the seventies.”

She smiled slowly and tried to hold in her giggles. I watched her, amused. She was very cute when she looked like that, I realized . . . she was so small it was hard for me to believe she was just entering her second decade. I liked the sound of her laughter; it was so pure despite the harsh realities of her life. I hadn’t heard laughter like that in a very long time and was sorely tempted to pounce on her and tickle the Hell out of her to keep it going. I decided that would be far too intimate, however, and stayed in my crouch until she was more composed.

“So, how old are you, then?” she finally asked when she could keep her face straight.

“Mid-twenties,” I shrugged, still smiling. She really was very pretty with the setting sun behind her like that . . . Damn it! What the Hell is wrong with me?? I can take out a squad of Apocalypse’s Madri single-handed, help re-write the entire universe, and yet a woman can distract me like that, repeatedly. Don’t get emotionally involved, don’t even think about it Kurt, you’ll just get hurt in the end like always. “Ahh . . . those rabbits smell so good. It’s been too long since I’ve had a fresh hunt on my table like this,” I changed the subject for the good of us both. She went along with it seamlessly and we continued to talk throughout the meal; then we put out the cooking fire and got movingin. in. But she kept smiling at me throughout the night – what was so interesting about me that she kept looking over and blushing? It wasn’t like she hadn’t already had ample time to get a good look at me. I kept reminding myself to keep my hands off and play nicely but that was hard to do when she kept glowing red like that each time I found her looking at me – she almost looked like a schoolgirl with a crush or something. That was impossible, of course, but it still made a small part of me wonder.