Part Six
The bus lurched over the ruined earth like a boat on a choppy sea. Captain Kurt Wagner rubbed the sleeve of his jet-black uniform against the crusty window, only to realize most of the filth clouding his view was on the outside of the glass. Not that there was much to look at out there. Just chewed up trees and burnt out homes; the bomb-crater remnants of what had once been a pretty suburban town. In Kurt's experience, this was a pretty standard view, not just in the US but around the world. Only to be expected after nearly six years of war.
"You know, I had a girlfriend once, lived round here."
Lieutenant Walters' voice brought Kurt back to the people inside the bus. There were four of them besides himself, all of them seasoned soldiers...and all of them fighting for the opposing team. Captain Emily Saunders, their mission leader, sat at the front near the driver, Corporal Miranda Turner, her black cap pulled low over her sandy-blonde curls. Lieutenant Steve Walters and Sergeant Keisha McAdams sat together at the back of the bus, chatting among themselves. Kurt sat nearer the middle of the bus. Under normal circumstances, the outgoing mutant would have joked his way to the center of attention, but this was his first solo undercover mission and, for the time being, he felt it would be best to keep a low profile.
It wasn't that he feared doing or saying something that would give him away—Kurt was a professional and he'd been trained by the best. All those sessions with Professor Xavier, working on his mental discipline—he was confident he could pull off this role. No, it wasn't his training or any doubt of his acting ability that kept him from joining in with the others. It was his verdammt holowatch. Hard-light technology was still pretty new, and Kurt didn't want to run the risk of anyone accidentally brushing against his fur or feeling his three, thick fingers in case the solid illusion that hid his mutations went soft.
"Yeah, that was her house," Walters continued as the bus lurched over a pothole. Kurt twisted his neck so he could see him, sitting in the seat behind and to the left. Like the rest of them, the strain of their missions was beginning to tell on the young man. The lieutenant's dark face was lean and shadowed with dirt, and he looked like he could use a good, hot meal.
"452 Begonia Street. I picked her up there for the Hopkins Jr. High Winter Social, just two weeks before the place closed its doors for the last time. I joined up after Christmas. Always did wonder what happened to her, though. Julie Tayner."
"Heh." Captain Saunders turned in her seat and laughed around the smoldering black cigar she held clenched between her teeth. "Junior High. Man! And here I was thinking Granger was the kid in this outfit."
Kurt smiled a little and gave a shrug as all eyes turned to him. Well, not exactly to 'him', German-born mutant Captain Kurt Wagner. The man they saw was Corporal Stewart Granger, a pale kid from Boston, Mass. with green eyes and chestnut hair. The name was a tribute to Kurt's obsession with old swashbuckler movies – Stewart Granger had been the star of the 1952 film Scaramouche, which boasted the longest swordfight in movie history.
"Hey guys, what can I say," he said in his best impression of a Boston accent. "I'm older than I look."
"Yeah? And how old's that? Twelve? Thirteen?" McAdams teased, reaching over the back of the chair to ruffle his curly brown hair.
"Yeah, come on, Granger," Walters said. "If I'm seventeen and a half, you can't be more than, what? Eighteen? Twenty?"
Try twenty-nine, Kurt thought to himself. And I'll be thirty in November…an old man in this group.
Out loud, and back in character, he said, "I'm twenty-two. Hell, I was supposed to graduate college this year. Guess that won't happen. Not now the universities have all closed."
"College." Corporal Turner snorted. "No loss there," she called back from the driver's seat. "I hear all they taught at those places was mutie-lovin' propaganda bull. It's 'cause those rich muties ran the top schools behind the scenes, you know? Funding their biased curriculum with all that money they got through threats and mind control."
The rest of the group shouted their approval. Kurt grit his teeth, hard. That kind of mutant-conspiracy garbage always sparked his ire, but he couldn't let his personal reaction show here. He took a few deep breaths and, when he was able to unclench his jaw without fear of releasing some choice words in Turner's direction, he said, "Yeah, I guess you're right. But I did kinda want to get a degree, you know?"
"What were you planning to study?" Saunders asked.
"I dunno. Genetics, mostly," Kurt said without missing a beat. He, Logan and Xavier had worked hard plotting out Granger's entire backstory. They had drilled together for weeks until Kurt knew it almost better than he knew his own. "Actually, that's why I'm here, sir—why I joined up with the LGP. I wanted to have a hand in finally discovering humanity's true genetic code. Our purest essence."
It was hard to get the words out while keeping a straight face, but Kurt managed it.
Until recently, the LGP, or League for Genetic Purity, had been just another radical Anti-Mutant sect. But, in the four years since the public school system collapsed, it had grown into a full-fledged cult, drawing most of its members from the masses of young soldiers in their teens and twenties who had been children when the schools shut down. According to Xavier, these kids were looking for answers, and had no faith in human goodness or government. To them, human intelligence was a joke and progress was a cruel illusion. Many of the LGP members had lost their families to the war, their childhoods, and few of them had more than a basic elementary school education. All of which made them perfect fodder for the LGP cult.
The LGP preached that humanity had in fact been created in the image of a perfect God, but over the millennia their pure genetic essence had been polluted as the various races interbred. Sumerians married Babylonians, Celts married Romans, Africans married Indians, Swedes married Malaysians, all resulting in a confused genetic muddle as far from the divine as it was possible to get. These 'devolved' humans were violent and selfish, which accounted for all the suffering humanity had inflicted upon itself throughout its history. According to LGP propaganda, the rise of the 'Mutant Menace' was the ultimate proof of humanity's genetic corruption—a punishment from God, as it were. The only way out of the endless cycle of violence was to rediscover the 'pure' DNA of the original 'divine' human template and create a race of 'perfect' clones. Once these clones were established, all 'imperfect' humans and mutants alike would be destroyed in a glorious Doomsday that would put an end to war forever, 'cleansing' the Earth of their corrupting presence and leaving plenty of room for the 'pure' race, who of course would be the only survivors, to multiply and flourish.
The whole thing was built on biological and philosophical fallacies that would have been laughable if the movement didn't have such a dynamic and devoted following. As it stood, the LGP was a eugenics-inspired nightmare at its most dangerous; a direct path to mass suicide fed by anger and ignorance. Kurt's mission was to infiltrate the cult from the inside, to try to find a way to diffuse the suicidal tinderbox before it was set alight. All that stood between him and discovery was his wits, and a thin shield of excited photons.
Captain Saunders smiled around the smoking stogie wedged into the corner of her mouth. "Looks like you're in luck, kid."
"Sir?" Kurt asked.
"The Divine Code," she said. "It may be in our grasp sooner than we thought. We're headed to a lab down in North Carolina where, if our Intelligence serves, those damn mutie-lovers have been working on tracing the human genome. Trying to make some case that the X-Gene's a normal step in human evolution." She spat. "Devolution's more like it. But here's where we come in. Word has it those so-called scientists there may have cracked the Code at last."
"Whoa." Walters grinned. "So what's our role? Infiltrate the lab and snatch the Code?"
Saunders' skewed smile stretched into a crooked grin. "If we pull this off, we could have pure, perfect humans cloned within the next three months. The self-proclaimed 'superior' mutant-kind will be obsolete, all their genetic flaws and defects shown for the revolting disease they are. Then, the world will finally glimpse humanity's true potential. Humanity's true perfection. Doomsday may well be at hand."
The devout group raised their clasped hands to their lips, then pressed them first to their hearts, then to the tops of their heads.
"The war will be over," McAdams sighed, stretching her arms up and wiggling her fingers toward the roof of the bus. "The Earth will be purged of its sickness at last!"
Kurt had to swallow the rising bile in his throat before he could dredge up a convincing grin. It was clear to him that the hypocrisy of their so-called 'divine mission' was completely lost on these people. He could sort of understand their desire to create a race of 'perfect' humans, humans to whom war and cruelty was completely unknown. He understood that, in their minds, the only way to achieve that 'purity' was to sacrifice everything that had come before – in other words, human civilization itself. But it amazed him that none of these people had made the connection that messing around with human DNA to shape a so-called 'perfect' clone was no different than Magneto's attempts to create an 'improved' mutant army. Kurt knew better than to bring that up, though. There was no quicker way to lose a fanatic's trust than to start questioning their deepest beliefs, no matter how flawed and violent those beliefs might be.
As the bus rolled on, past mile after mile of ruined land, Kurt quickly got to know the rest of the team. He learned McAdams was the youngest, at fifteen, and that Captain Saunders, who looked about thirty-four, was really only twenty-six. She was the only one of the group (besides Kurt) who'd earned her high school diploma, and she'd been working as a secretary at an engineering firm when the war broke out.
"But why the LGP?" Kurt asked, the relaxed, friendly atmosphere encouraging him to test his boundaries a little.
"We Americans," Saunders said gruffly. "We were supposed to be the world's melting pot. There wasn't one kid in my town who wasn't of mixed heritage – Polish, Irish, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Russian, Cambodian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Bengali, you name it. When we drew our family trees and stuck them to the back board at school, it was like looking at a map of the world. And look at us now. Different races, different faiths, they were never welcome here. Mixing our blood only caused us to hate ourselves. And what came with all that hate? Cancer clusters, mutant children—it's more than just a fluke of nature. Our corruption goes down to our very genes. The great American experiment has failed. It's past time we wiped the board clean and started fresh."
Kurt shook his head, his heart heavy with pity for this young woman and her twisted, defeatist philosophy. "My mother had MS," he said softly, covering his pained expression with a bit of Granger's made-up backstory. "She wasn't a mutant, but her genes killed her just the same. And I've always been scared they'd kill me too."
"Granger's got a point," Walters said. "We're all of us ticking time bombs."
"It's God's wrath," McAdams said confidently. "We are imperfect. Flawed. Our sacrifice is our only hope of proving we are worthy of salvation."
"Doomsday," Saunders said with a smoky smile. "When it dawns, let it dawn brightly. Let its fire cleanse us of all our flaws and sins."
Kurt closed his eyes and turned his head back to the window. He didn't say another word until the bus stopped, letting them off about a mile from their heavily guarded destination.
More story, coming soon! The finale's just ahead, so please stay tuned! :)
