Note: Thanks to everyone for the great comments. It's wonderful to hear from everyone. Here's 22. 23 is moving along, but not finished yet. Thanks for hanging in with me.

Chapter 22

Logan leaned back against the sagging wall of an abandoned, crumbling cottage at the edge of the estate's woods while his mind roamed through foreign memories from decades earlier. The cottage had probably been a hunting cabin or men's retreat when it was first built. Later, some of the Institute's students had turned it into a kind of play fort complete with hand-made flags, now faded and shredding. The memories, in contrast, took place in a green, hot hell.

That hell wasn't the Vietnam of movies, not the new pro-soldier ones nor the old anti-war versions. It was a land of fear rather than courage, of hate and exhaustion and loneliness. Logan placed Stryker's memories around 1969. That was before a majority of Americans hated the war, before My Lai shifted from victory to massacre in the news. Nixon was in office, and not yet seen as a crook. It was spring, probably, though Logan couldn't be sure of that. Some guys were painting 'hippie' on their helmets, but no one had heard of Woodstock yet.

He shifted his position against the stone wall and took a long drag from his cigar. The tended woods rustled and there was a relentless chorus of cicada somewhere nearby, very different sounds from those in that long ago jungle. Still, the smoke in his lungs and the trees overhead helped him run a single memory to ground. He'd been sitting, propped against a tree, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the letter from his wife still in his pocket waiting to be read. The new guy, Logan, crouched nearby, staring into the jungle. Was this one going to make it?

It was unsettling to see himself as another person in memories. Logan shook off the disorientation and tried to focus back on the scene. The letter in the pocket, why was it troubling? Why hadn't Stryker read it?

The letter had been in his pocket nearly a week, since the last time they'd gotten a mail drop. They were on recon now, faces smeared green and gray, bandoliers crossing their chests even when they slept. It would be years before he would be able to sleep without that crossed weight on him, but that was one of Logan's own memories, confusing and off point. The letter, that was what he had to remember. That was the key to this intruder in his mind.

He returned to William Stryker's memory of sitting in the dirt, back against the tree, and thinking about the letter. Stryker dreaded reading another report of his son's troubles. He was so far from home, impotent to help his struggling wife deal with a child who, at eight, might well be going insane. Or worse. William feared much worse. Even here in the jungle he'd heard rumors from home of kids born with strange powers. Some people thought those mutants, or their parents, had been damaged by nuclear testing. He didn't want to believe Jason's problems could be the result of mutation, though. Mutation couldn't be fixed. Still, it hurt to think his child was terrifying people because he missed his dad.

William sucked on the cigarette until it burned to the filter, then put the stump out in the damp dirt next to his boot. The new guy was studying him closely. "Something wrong, Sir."

"Nope, Logan. Nothing at all. I just hate the jungle."

The guy, couldn't really call Logan a kid even though he was new, stared off into the trees again. He wore an unsettling expression that suggested this wasn't the first jungle he'd seen, nor the worst. "Something to hate about everywhere, I suppose."

"But most places have something to love too." He thought about his home in Missouri. The river at St. Joseph was so wide and icy blue. Not like the rivers here that slithered like brown snakes through jungle and rice paddy.

Logan shrugged, not revealing whatever he was thinking. He did that a lot too. The staring and the secretiveness would make most people suspicious, he supposed. Not Stryker though, Logan realized as the memory ended abruptly.

Logan had expected an oily disgust to permeate Stryker's memories. The man he'd left to die at Alkali Lake had been a monster. But, the mind sharing space with his cared about his men, and worried about the young wife and child he'd been forced to leave behind when he went to war. A series of memories flashed, without time or place connections. Stryker wishing he'd gone to seminary as he'd once intended, because as a minister he might have known how to give comfort to a dying soldier. Stryker staring at a worn picture of his family; the glossy surface being suddenly marred by a drop of rain, or a tear. The man in his mind didn't fit the one he'd abandoned at Alkali Lake. Not at all.

It started to rain where Logan lounged by the cottage too. He looked up into the shadowed trees at the fading sky, then decided to finish his cigar inside where it would be dry. Stryker had changed between Vietnam and Alkali Lake. But then, the war had changed a lot of men. It had probably changed him too, though he couldn't remember.

Inside, the shed smelled of dirt and mildew. The kids had added a small game table to the collection of old shelves and benches. One of the metal legs had rusted through so the table now tottered, but the log stools arranged around it remained solid. Logan dragged one to the doorway and sat where he could look out into the darkening woods. Beyond the trees the estate's small lake looked dead and black already. The mansion, on the far side of the water, was hidden in fog.

He and Stryker had spent a lot of nights in huts not too different from this cottage during their stint in Nam. The shabby hovels only lowered the already trench-deep opinions a lot of the guys had about the local population, but that was unfair. Most of those huts had been poor, but neat places before some army or another tramped through. Sometimes you could see signs of how the loving home some hut had once been -- a pot still carefully tucked into a niche designed for it, or a mat woven in a neat, intricate design. Stryker noticed those things. They used to talk about the tragedy those details represented when they had nothing else.

Another of Stryker's memories fell into place. It was late autumn and their squad hunkered down on the crest of a hill overlooking a broad plateau that included a lake. People back home thought of Vietnam as just jungles, river, and rice paddies. But, it had a varied landscape -- mangrove swamps and forests of bamboo or evergreens, leaves of every size and shape, paths of mud and paths lined with stone, massive hilltop shrines, bustling cities, primitive villages.

The cluster of buildings below fell into the final category, a grubby cluster of straw thatched houses trapped between lake, hills, and jungle. A handful of brick buildings stood a little farther out, in their own clearing, and beyond them, flat and boggy fields. What stood out was the lack of livestock. Villages were normally clogged with all manner of animals from dogs to geese to oxen. But, through the binoculars, William could only see people moving among the huts. The distant rice fields looked haphazardly tended, as well. The oddities made the back of his neck itch.

He'd already sent Martin and Lopez down to recon. They were good men and it had only been an hour. Still, he had the feeling something had gone wrong. No gunfire, no radio contact, but a warning tickle wouldn't stop crawling up and down his spine. He didn't want to lose more men. If orders allowed him to forget that village, he would have.

"Don't like the smell from that place," Logan said. The guy was no longer new, no longer someone to fret over. Hell, the guy had uncanny luck. It was almost like God didn't want to let the man die. The temptation to send Logan in first every time hovered in his mind. But, it wasn't fair to ask even the luckiest man on Earth to take all the risks.

"What are you getting?" He'd exploited Logan's supernaturally sharp senses more than once in the past. William thought the guy had to be one of those mutants they heard about from time to time, when he let himself think about mutants.

He thrust those thoughts away, disgusted with himself. Worrying about Jason wouldn't help him. Only focusing on his job here would finish the war and get him home where he could do some real good for the boy.

"Not sure." Logan rubbed his nose. His brows folded low over his eyes. "Something's not normal down there."

In the cabin, Logan's claws popped suddenly. His ears belatedly registered the sound of feet slapping wet, dead leaves in the distance. A gasp of laughter followed, still far off. He forced his muscles to relax. The claws slowly retracted and his breathing evened out. Just kids out in the woods. Nothing worse. Nothing from memory.

Yet, he couldn't completely shake off the fear that had grabbed him. In his mind he saw himself again through Stryker's eyes as he tried to rub the unwanted scent-that-wasn't-really-scent from his nose. That image, that memory, frightened him. Logan was used to fearing for the kids, for friends, sometimes for the world. But, he'd long gotten past any fear for himself. What could be taken from a man who had lost everything and couldn't die?

But on that day, looking down on that village, he'd been afraid for all of them, himself included. Of what, and why, he didn't know. And he wouldn't know unless he settled his mind enough to confront the rest of the memories. Logan straightened his back. He shook more tension from his arms, and crushed out the end of his cigar in the dirt floor. Then, he emptied his mind, waiting for what terrified him, telling himself he was the hunter of that terror and not the prey.

Still autumn. Still the same day as Stryker's last memory. He was moving through jungle now, tracking the sensation that troubled him. He'd told Stryker he smelled something wrong. That wasn't accurate. Instead, all his senses seemed to combine in a supernatural dread. He couldn't pin-point any one element of that danger. It caught in his nose, scrambled across his skin, made his ears ring. It was as if the warning came from inside rather than out, some sense beyond sense telling his nose and ears and flesh to register a threat. He didn't know how to follow the fear to its source.

The muck grabbed his boots with every step. It felt like walking in drying cement. Goldstein scuttled through the trees nearby, his back nearly level with the ground. The kid was only twenty, but already a veteran, a nice Jewish boy from Kansas who doted on some gentile princess named Molly and built train sets in his basement with his dad. Logan worried that Goldstein wouldn't make it through today.

My memory, not Stryker's. Logan managed to absorb the truth without breaking concentration. After Martin and Lopez failed to report back, Stryker had ordered them all down. Most were eager for a fight. Sitting in the dirt gave you nothing to think about except how much you wanted to go home. At least blood and fear of death offered a distraction from loneliness.

He and Goldstein crept toward the village from the East. The rattle of automatic gunfire told him most of the squad had already reached the target. Goldstein sprinted forward, crashing through the underbrush and gone instantly. Logan had little choice but to follow, though his mind continued to scream for caution. The wind shifted, bringing a whiff of acrid smoke that clung to the inner walls of his nose. His senses, always acute, elevated so that he heard the creak of hidden springs that held down half buried mines and the strands of stretched wire glittered in the shadows. But, the jungle offered no natural, living sounds, not even the movement of insects or lizards, to Logan's hypersensitive ears.

Leaves rustled. Branches snapped. Goldstein's heavy breathing rasped somewhere ahead. A high-toned, metal ping followed by an explosion combined with a scream, told him Goldstein caught a trap.

Though Logan tracked the single, shrill cry easily, it took him several minutes to reach the other soldier. Goldstein had almost made it out of the jungle. He lay in a little pocket of clear ground at the very edge of the trees, face down. The smell of blood remained faint. Maybe the kid wasn't that badly injured. Logan concentrated on the surrounding jungle as he knelt. He turned Goldstein over.

Pain shot into his torso, hot and shocking. Knife. Lung cut. Near the heart. Pulse suddenly thinning. His mind always registered injury with precision. He felt the wounds healing deep inside his body before he realized that Goldstein had stabbed him.

The young man's eyes, which normally only glittered with excitement when he talked about trains or his girlfriend, sparked with joy. The kid was grinning at him. Logan managed, "What the hell?" Then an unseen assailant toppled him.

His body moved without thought -- twist to face the attack, one hand up to catch the blow, grab his own knife with the other. The slight figure grappling with him proved surprisingly strong. Logan fought on, and he felt heat flood his muscles. He'd stabbed his attacker a dozen times as they rolled in the dirt. But, the man wouldn't die.

He sensed a second attack from the left, too fast for his eye to catch, too silent for his ears to hear. He slashed in that direction, felt the blade carve through a substance very like muscle and flesh. There was no time to look at what he might have injured. His first attacker had both hands around Logan's throat.

He broke the man's arms. A vicious cut across the man's throat nearly separated head and body. As the man fell back, however, Logan saw -- no wrong word -- sensed two rope-like appendages swinging toward him. He cut one, grabbed the other. Then, he had to stare.

He'd managed to catch an oily stalk double the thickness of his thumb. The tip glistened with jellied eggs and twitched frantically in his fist. But, the other end of the stalk simply ended about six inches out from his grip, as if it had popped through a door in thin air. That sense of dread enveloped him. It was this wriggling stalk, this alien monster, that had terrified him earlier.

Instinctively, he knew the thing was attached to the small man he'd just killed. If he'd truly killed the attacker. Not enough blood sprayed from the neck wound. The eyes refused to glass over. And, the man continued to grin.

Logan felt the thing in his hand strain for freedom. Several stingers pushed out of the fibrous neck. They stabbed at his hands. The venom they injected burned, and for a moment he worried that might kill him. But, if anything, it accelerated his own body's healing.

The fat eggs began to drop wriggling monsters onto his arm. The creatures flickered as if about to vanish, then shriveled to dead husks instead. Logan severed the stalk with his knife and threw it to the ground.

The cries and the gunfire from the village had ceased. When Logan looked around both the man he'd been fighting and Goldstein had disappeared into the jungle. He stood a moment, staring at the alien thing at his feet. Monster? Demon? Eater of Souls, his present day mind supplied. The little Vietnamese man who attacked him had been infected, as were the rest of the villagers. Stryker's entire team had charged in, never knowing what they faced.

In the cabin, Logan was sweating despite the chill rain outside. He didn't want to finish reliving the memory of that village. He steadied his breathing, tried to force his mind back. It rebelled. He caught the events in snatches, like still photographs, instead of living them. He saw villagers dead and himself demanding the bodies be burned. He recalled the horror growing inside him as, throughout the night, more and more of the soldiers returned to camp. Men who should have been dead. Men who were no longer human.

He'd been forced to live among them, constantly reminded how they'd changed from friends who talked pinup girls and baseball into monsters whose only joy was blood and death. They would have liked to kill him. Stryker especially. But, of course, they couldn't.

Logan chose to avoid those memories. He focused, instead, on a time months later, after Stryker and half the unit had rotated back to the US. The new commander had not been taken by a monster, so the soldiers were lying low. Logan and Goldstein were patrolling through an abandoned rice paddy alone. Up to their waists in water, weapons held over their heads to keep them dry, it seemed the perfect time to test a theory he'd been forming.

A single kick took Goldstein's legs out from under him. He came up sputtering and mad, that cold monster's outrage turning his long face into a mask. He took a swing with the butt of his rifle, now water-logged and unable to be fired until it was clean. Logan dodged the blow. "You can't kill me," he mocked the creature. "You can't do anything."

But it could. He'd seen one of them kill with their eyes just a few weeks earlier. That was the theory he needed to test. A few more feints got the thing really angry. They angered easily, another weakness. Then, it materialized over Goldstein's head. The stench nearly sent Logan to his knees.

A doughy mass, swelling and retracting with each breath, draped over Goldstein's skull and down his back. Above, a tiny head lolled like a marble on a bed of old pudding, and on that head a nest of red eyes quivered. Logan felt one eye focus on him. He focused on the long snout protruding from the belly just below the head. That jointed beak arched in front of Goldstein's face. Its tip penetrated the left side of his chest.

Two eyes connected. Logan leapt right, forcing the monster to begin again. He let three eyes lock on him before he moved again, left this time, and closer. Always closer. Not so much that the beast would sense the threat. The fourth time he let five eyes reach him and it was as if he will to exist were being sucked out of him. Gritting his teeth, Logan dove at Goldstein. He caught hold of the monster's beak.

The Eater vanished instantly, but, as he'd suspected, the beak in his fist was caught in this reality. It couldn't dematerialize. Logan severed the beak at a joint. Black fluid spurted from the wound. Goldstein collapsed.

Later, Logan would learn that Goldstein recovered. He returned to being the guy who loved model trains. There was a huge hole in his memory from the last several months of his tour. About half the victims Logan later liberated from their Eaters recovered, in fact. He cleaned up the infected troops still in Vietnam, and worried about what was happening with those, like Stryker, who returned to the States.

It would be years before Logan fully understood the monsters. He learned details like how they reproduced and how they organized in groups as he hunted Stryker and his cluster of Eater pals down. But for the rest of his two year tour in Nam he could only wait and think. Every night he would lie in the damp and wonder how long it took for one of those monsters to mature and make its own young. He hoped he would not return home to a land of monsters.

A branch snapped outside the cottage and Logan felt his claws pop. He dove toward the doorway, only stopped by the sound of high pitched laughter that quickly descended into a terrified shriek. Kitty gulped loudly and flattened into the doorframe. He'd stopped his claws a quarter inch into where her nose should have been. For a moment, he could only stare at her.

"Like to unphase here," she whimpered. Logan sheathed the claws and stepped back, mortified he'd almost stabbed the girl. Kitty separated herself from the door. She took a deep, if shaky, breath. "Thanks."

"You shouldn't sneak up on me," Logan said.

"Sneak?" Bobby Drake challenged as he and Peter crowded into the small room. "Logan, we were shouting and running through the rain. How could that be any more not-sneaking?"

"You could get someone killed." Logan wasn't about to give ground just because the kids had been noisy enough to wake the dead. If he did he'd have to explain that he'd been buried in memories so deep he couldn't hear the real world. Better to change the subject. "What are you kids doing running around in the rain?"

"Kitty wanted to tell us something about the professor," Peter said. Logan had always liked the grave calm that boy could bring into a place. Kitty sent Peter a glare, however.

Okay, private reminiscing about a dead teacher was something Logan could happily leave to them. "I'm probably not interested anyway."

"No." Drake blocked his path to the door, making the cramped space feel even smaller. "The professor's returning, and it's some big secret. Dr. Grey's return was a big secret and look how that turned out. I think everyone needs to be in on this one."

"The professor is back from the dead?" That carried all sorts of unpleasant connotations given the memories Logan had just been reviewing. But the professor being an Eater didn't make sense. Jean had obliterated his body, and Logan had never fought an Eater that wasn't basically a reanimated corpse. Speaking of which, how the hell could the professor come back without a body? "Yeah, I'd say you better start talking."

They took turns explaining the conversation between Ororo and the unseen Scottish woman they overheard outside the professor's office. Kitty finished with, "And this summer, in class, he posed this moral problem to us. He asked if it was right for a dying mutant to take over a brain-dead man's body just because he could. I was sure that the professor was going to argue that it wasn't right. And yet, now it seems he's done it."

Well, that answered one question. "So, the professor has a new body, but the same old mind?"

"Yes, but that's not the point," Kitty protested. "He was teaching us ethics and he did an unethical thing."

Logan wasn't as surprised as Kitty. Xavier had manipulated Jean for his own purposes and managed to suppress the part of her that would have loved Logan. It surprised him how much that episode still hurt. Hell, he'd rather be back in the Nam memories than recall the last days with Jean. He tensed his muscles so the kids wouldn't see him shake.

"I'm sure the professor has his reasons," Logan said, because he wouldn't shred the kids' adoration of their mentor right now. There was nothing to be gained by that. Still, the professor coming back wasn't automatic celebration for Logan it would be for everyone else. Yes, the man's death had hurt, but he couldn't forget the darker facets of personality he'd seen. He'd learned in Vietnam to put friendship aside when necessary.

Scott might understand his position better and think rationally about whether the professor was going to be an asset or hindrance in the war Marie's friend had foretold. But, talking to Scott would have to wait until morning. Logan really didn't want to disturb his time with Marie.

" I want the professor back as much as anyone. " Kitty frowned. " It's just I was sure he'd think taking over another person's body was wrong. I would have staked my grade on it."

"You dragged us out here to complain about a school project." Drake sounded disgusted. "I thought it was something important."

"You're missing the point, Bobby."

"The point is that we've still got a monster out there somewhere who is plotting to burn the world down around our ears, and we don't even know for sure how to find it. Or weren't you paying attention at the meeting this morning?" Drake tried to prowl the room only to be thwarted by lack of space. Logan sympathized. He was beginning to feel restless as well.

"I was paying attention. We're going to rebuild Cerebro and find someone to operate it. Magneto is probably the one we need to find." Kitty's voice rose several octaves as she went on.

"I think it's a good thing the professor is coming back." Peter's voice stilled the argument. "He's going to be able to help us sort a lot of things out."

"Sort things out is exactly what we need to do," Logan grabbed the opportunity to control. A tightness in his gut warned that they shouldn't be trusting anyone right now, though he had no verification for that instinct. "I'll talk to Scott in the morning and we'll figure out how to present what we do know to the professor. Until then, you kids stay calm and don't tell anyone else about any of this. We don't want people jumping to conclusions."

"But we can help--" Drake started.

"You can help by laying low for now," Logan said. The soldiers and Stryker and the current situation were all scratching at the back of his mind, making him edgy an ready to jump at shadows. But, if there was one thing his memories had taught him, it was to never trust the improbable return of a friend.

-----

Marie hugged Scott's waist as they road back to the mansion. She liked the way his body heat warmed her despite both the jacket he wore and the chill rain starting to come down. He pulled into the garage just as the skies really opened up.

"Made it just in time." He tripped the kick stand and took off his helmet.

Marie eased off the back of the bike, reluctant to release him. She knew she should say goodnight and wander up to her room, or down to the kitchen to look for a late supper, anywhere away from him. They needed to part ways here or the good things they'd shared would start to sour on the realization they couldn't spend the night together. She couldn't seem to make her body move.

"It's going to work out, Marie. I promise." Scott fingered the collar of the shirt she was still wearing -- his shirt. He'd coaxed her to keep it when they dressed.

"I know." She brushed her cheek against his fingers, too quickly for her power to hurt him. Maybe if she repeated that idea enough times the doubt would go away. She would sleep in his shirt tonight so she could at least have his scent with her.

Scott was the one with the iron will. He withdrew his hand, swung his leg off the bike and managed to move a few steps toward the stairs. "We'll talk in the morning. We'll figure out how to make this work."

He meant it, Marie told herself. He'd found a new way for them to touch without skin contact. Still, old fears never died without a fight. She couldn't help wondering if what they shared would be enough. He was satisfied now, more or less. But what about in a month, in a year? How long would he stay?

Scott turned then, heading toward the stairs. She saw her own shirt hidden in the pocket of his jacket. Marie smiled, knowing why he'd kept it. They would have something else to share tonight, even though they had to sleep alone.