I Was a Teenage Freak
Prologue
"Jesus," Ororo Munroe whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. Somewhere in the bottom of her stomach, bile began to churn unpleasantly.
Beside her, Peter Rasputin winced. Wolverine, aside from sniffing once, gave no indication of what he was feeling.
The three of them were standing at the entrance of an alley, where the harsh glare of a streetlamp was casting a ghoulish shadow on the corpse in front of them.
The corpse, before it became a corpse, had obviously been a mutant. It lay coiled on the wet and grubby ground, a grotesque segmented body that resembled a gigantic worm, pink and orange and red under the flashing neon sign of the club next door.
Stubby arms were thrown over what only slightly resembled a human face --- the person had tried to defend himself. Deep, angry slashes covered his arms and his upper body, but the one that had killed him was immediately evident.
It was a ragged opening in his chest, no bigger than any of the other cuts, but clearly more fatal. Blood, still warm and fresh, bubbled and spurted around it, spilling to the ground and mixing with the grime, gasoline and rainwater. The neon sign was reflected in it, staining it with brilliant and morbid colors.
Outside the alley, the world went on unaware. Dance music pumped out of the club as the door opened to let people in. A taxi driver was blowing his horn and yelling cusses in Pakistani. Other drivers were responding in kind.
It seemed unreal to Ororo, as though the alley and the street outside had somehow become the stage for an outlandish movie that hyped and glorified death in all its cold grisliness.
Except... except she could smell the garbage in the dumpster next to the body (or was that the body itself?). She could hear water dripping from an air conditioner above their heads. She felt the chill in the air that carried the foul stench of decay. Whether that smell was coming from the corpse or the city itself, she couldn't tell.
"Jesus Christ," she whispered.
All at once, tears of fear, panic and disgust filled her eyes. She would later pity and grieve for the slain mutant as if she'd known him, but right now all she wanted to do was get away. Her vision suddenly became clouded, and she began to back out of the alley.
"I knew I smelled something dead," Wolverine said. The detachment in his voice frightened her.
"We should call the police," Peter said. His voice sounded strained, as though he was trying to keep himself from freaking out. In a selfish way, that comforted Ororo.
"Right, Russkie," Wolverine said. There was just the slightest hint of a sneer in his voice. "'Cause the cops are gonna be so eager to find out who killed a fucking mutie. And a dog-ugly one, at that."
"What do you suggest then?" Peter demanded. "That we leave him here and wait until somebody notices the smell?"
Wolverine didn't respond, but his indifferent expression suggested that he'd been thinking something along those lines.
"Let's get out of here," Peter said, following Ororo as she barreled away from the alley.
Ororo didn't sleep at all that night. As soon as she, Peter and Wolverine came through the doors of Xavier's Institute, she ran up the stairs and went into her bedroom, locking the door behind her.
Henry had seen her and looked concerned. He probably would have followed after her and asked what was wrong, if she hadn't thrown him a look that unmistakably told him to stay away. She wasn't in the mood for company. And she sure as hell didn't want to have to explain to anyone what she'd seen tonight.
She threw herself on her bed, grabbed her headphones and pulled them over her head. As loud rock music began to assault her ears, she slid down on her pillow and curled up, hugging her knees to her chest.
She had never felt safe in any place until she'd come to Xavier's Institute. Running away from home, living in the streets, she'd been in constant terror of hunger, of the cold, of rape, of being killed, of ending up behind bars when the beat cops found out that she'd been boosting cars all the way from Texas.
But since Jean Grey had busted her out of jail and taken her to the school, she felt for once that she could sleep peacefully, without fear. Even as an X-Man, when she had to face more dangers than the average man on the street could boast of, she still felt that she could keep all those things outside the school and outside her room.
But now it seemed that the world, with all its perils and promised pain, had found its way inside her last sanctuary.
Ororo turned up the volume of her CD player and closed her eyes against her tears, willing away the visions of the dead mutant and his blood running red along the ground.
To Be Continued