The Ultimate X-Men

Stan
Lee

Editor

BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY INC. NEW YORK

BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

(OIIflTS

INTRODUCTION

Stan Lee

Illustration by Joe St. Pierre

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE ^
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eluki bes shahar
Illustration by Tom Grummett

GIFT OF THE SILVER FOX

Ashley McConnell
Illustration by Gary Frank

STILLBORN IN THE MIST^*'
⁶
*'
¹

Dean Wesley Smith
Illustration by Ralph Reese

X-PRESSO

Ken Grobe

Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg

FOUR ANGRY MUTANTS

Andy Lane & Rebecca Levene
Illustration by Brent Anderson

ON THE AIR .

Glenn Hauman
Illustration by Ron Lim

SUMMER BREEZE

Jenn Saint-John & Tammy Lynne Dunn
Illustration by James W. Fry

(OITtHTS

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM    205

Stan Timmons

Illustration by Rick Leonardi & Terry Austin

225

Evan Skolnick

Illustration by Dave Cockrum & John Nyberg

HOSTAGES

J. Steven York
Illustration by Ralph Reese

OUT OF PLACE    287

Dave Smeds

Illustration by Brent Anderson

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES    309

iimuaion

Stan Lee

Illustration by Joe St. Pierre

in A WONDERFUL LlfE

eluki lies shahar

Illustration by Tom Grummett

roily miles north of New York City in the northernmost tip of Westchester County lies the small town of Salem Center, New York. Here vast tracts of gently wooded greensward cradle the sprawling estates; they are still mostly private houses, though one of the stately homes that once boasted a secret dock for smuggling Prohibition-era booze and still can claim an unrivaled view of the Hudson River has become a five-star restaurant, and another is now a thriving bed-and-breakfast. The town of Salem Center is the kind of place that driven Manhattan professionals like to escape
to:
surrounded by riding academies and private schools, all the grace notes of a life of wealth and privilege, it. is a community that values privacy, where secrets are jealously guarded.

Although some secrets are bigger than others.

On Greymalkin Lane the houses are set far back from the road. Their existence is proclaimed only by the pillars flanking the iron gates of the widely spaced driveways. On one gate in particular, as if identification of what lies within is particularly important, there is a small brass plaque: ‘‘The Xavier Institute of Higher Learning.”

Once I had a normal life.
The running man clung to that thought as if it were a place he could go to hide. He’d had a normal life, a quiet life, a life where men with guns didn’t come to his door, and then—and then—

His foot hit an exposed tree root and he was knocked sprawling. He lay facedown, sucking the wet-earth-scented air into burning lungs and wondering where he was. His last ride had dropped him north of New York City somewhere; he’d thought it was safe enough to hitch again. The

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running man had never heard of Professor Charles Xavier or his school, although he’d certainly heard of the X-Men. He had no idea that he was less than a mile from possibly the only people on earth who could help him. The running man had given up hope of help long ago.

He’d been standing at the edge of the road when he saw the black sedan with the government plates cruise past him In the southbound lane and then pull into the “Official Vehicles Only” turnaround. He’d taken off cross-country; when the landscape opened out into woods and fields, he was sure he’d lost them.

His breath rasped in and out of his lungs with a desperate gasping sound as he lay there. His throat felt as if he’d swallowed dry ice. Thoughts spun through his mind like angry hornets.

Have to get up.

Almost finished.

Get
up,
dammit!

But he couldn’t. He could only lie there. A matter of minutes now and Black Team 51 would have him.

If only he could be sure they’d kill him.

But they wouldn’t. That was the special hell of it. They wanted him to work for them. And he was afraid, afraid of what they would make him do. . . .

Once upon a time, the running man had possessed a name. He’d been David Ferris; twenty-nine, unmarried, and—according to his now ex-girlfriend Alicia—looked a lot like Fox Mulder on
The X-Files.
Until a week ago he’d been just another teacher at Penrod High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, brass buckle of the Corn Belt.

A normal life. Once he’d had a normal life.

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* * *

It was August, and so it was hot, and the four men and one woman could easily have sought the sanctuary of the air-conditioning inside the sprawling mansion—or even the pool on the other side of the house. Instead they sat in a casual grouping upon the shady flagstoned terrace at the back of the house, concealed from accidental view with a caution that had become habit long since. The only sound on the hot summer air was the rattle of ice in the tall lemonade glasses and the desultory sound of relaxed talk among them. These five had passed through Life and Death together, and the most important things they could express to one another had already been said long ago.

They were all in their twenties, all at that peak of health and conditioning that marks the professional athlete, whose success or failure depends entirely on the educated body’s response to the demanding mind. But these five were not professional athletes, though one of them, at least, had arrived at that peak of fame and adulation that only sports stars and rock stars—and super heroes—know.

Once he’d stood with the Avengers, Earth’s mightiest heroes, in the days when there were no East or West Coast Avengers, no first or second team. But before that his allegiance had been to another assemblage, in the days now long past when that supergroup’s roster could be counted on the digits of one hand: in that twilight moment between their discovery that they were different from the rest of humanity, and the moment the world learned to hate and fear them.

His name was Henry P. McCoy, and he was the X-Man known as the Beast.

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Of the five heroes gathered on that shady secluded terrace, Hank McCoy looked least human, though all five of them had been able to pass for human once—had in fact passed for human during one of those dark periods when the X-Men were driven underground by a prejudice so deep that even some of their fellow heroes turned against them, and Hank McCoy had left them to pursue his first love, biochemistry research. There, youthful pride and an experiment gone wrong had trapped him forever in a shape as bestial as his code name—the form of a burly blue-furred monster with long, gleaming fangs. Since his transformation Hank stood upright only with the greatest of effort, though he could bound along on his knuckles and toes faster than a racehorse could run.

At the moment Hank McCoy reclined in a specially reinforced lawn chair, the dark glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose adding a note of absurdity to his broad inhuman countenance. He perched his slippery tumbler of lemonade on the tip of one taloned finger and studied it meditatively.

“I hate to mention this, Warren m’boy, but you’re interfering with my tan,” Hank said.

Behind the Beast stood his teammate, bio-mechanical wings spread to block the sun. When Hank spoke, he spread them wider, then turned aside so that his shadow no longer fell upon the Beast’s blue-furred body.

“Oh, well, excuse
moi,”
Archangel said with a grin, making a big show of getting out of his teammate’s light.

Born Warren Worthington III, he had called himself the Avenging Angel when Professor Charles Xavier invited him to join the X-Men—and convinced him to shorten his name to simply Angel. But the man now called Archangel had drifted nearly as far from human as Hank had. Once great white-feathered wings had sprouted from his shoulder blades when the hormonal changes of puberty had brought his mutant gifts to flower—though those were gone now, irrevocably damaged in battle and amputated. In their place Archangel now bore glittering metal wings, as intricately feathered as his natural ones had been, and so bound into his nervous system that he could launch their razor-feather darts at will. The same dubious benefactor who had engineered this transformation had also turned Warren’s skin a cyanotic blue: stronger and tougher than ordinary human— or even mutant—skin, it provided a great advantage to Archangel in battle; at the same time it irrevocably marked him out from the rest of humanity. Different. Alien.

David Ferris had always known he was different—
get up you have to get up
—but when he’d been a child a quarter of a century ago the world had been different, too—

get up it isn’t that hard they’ll be here soon
—the superteams and lone costumed avengers that were so much a part of modern daily life now—
you can’t let them take you
—were a thing of the future, or dim past-era memories in the minds of those who had fought beside the more-than-human in World War II—Captain America, the SubMariner, the first Human Torch—then called the Invaders. The bitter enmity between
homo sapiens
and
homo superior
was still years in the future—
come on; it isn’t that hard
—in those days, growing up in rural Shelbyville, David

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had known that other people bowed to the inevitable, accepted the fact that choosing one thing made all the others impossible—

if you can’t walk, crawl!

—realized that life was a process of choosing one thing and forsaking all the rest.

But David Ferris didn’t have to.

Years later, in his reading, he came across the words that explained what he had known, instinctively, from birth: that there wasn’t one reality, but millions—that every possible choice that could ever be made was made
somewhere,
in one of the parallel worlds that, to David’s mutant perception, were as tangible and accessible as the books on the rack at the soda fountain downtown. David could spin the wheel of fortune and make those different worlds
real.

Worlds where Hitler had won World War II. Worlds where humanity had never evolved. Even worlds where humanity was the only known sentient species—no Atlanteans nor Kree, no Skrulls, not even Galactus to threaten sleep.

He might, with his mutant gift, have grown up to don a gaudy costume, taken a romantic
nom de guerre,
and gone on to fight crime and/or evil, as Benton Harper—Chicken-Man—used to say on the radio. But David just didn’t have a world-famous sort of nature, and when ultimate evil came to the Midwest, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four were almost always only half a jump behind.
get up