TOMORROW’S NOT THE END

By Hunter Lambright

“What the hell’s going on?!” asked Julian Keller, obviously pulled away from a particularly arousing bit of sex with one (or both) of his girlfriends. Billed as the school’s hottest piece of property—with plenty to go around—Julian’s muscularly built form was tensed in anger at the interruption. Running a hand through his mussed black hair, he shouted, “C’mon, teach! I was doing something important!” The ambiguity of his remark left some students chuckling.

Danielle Moonstar’s face was somber as she stood in front of the gathered student populace. Her skin was darkened by heritage from her Cheyenne bloodline, and the look on her face could have been pulled from one of her rather stereotypical American History textbooks. “Calm down, Julian,” she said into the microphone. “There’s a little more at stake than whatever you were doing.”

Behind Dani stood Rahne Sinclair, the Scottish mutant werewolf and Dani’s former teammate from their time on the New Mutants. “Och,” Rahne muttered, her teeth growing pointed as the restlessness inside the auditorium grew. “Ye dinnah think this would cause a wee problem?” she asked, her eyebrows arched. “The students will be startin’ a riot if ye do not stop them from burning the place down!”

Dani paused a moment before realizing that Rahne was right. “Attention!” Dani shouted, her amplified voice barely able to penetrate the sound coming from the mass of students.

“ATTENTION!”

Suddenly, the roof broke inward, showering the group with weightless rubble. In reached the purple glove of a Sentinel robot. Several students screamed in fear of the mutant-hunting menace before the illusion dissipated into nothingness.

“Now can I have your attention?” asked Dani, her eyebrows furrowed in anger. She was the epicenter of the “destruction,” and now she had become the center of attention. “We have some sad and problematic news to relate to you students tonight,” she began. “Earlier in the woods (before the attack from D-Generation), Miss Sinclair found the body of Liam O’Keefe, codenamed Backdraft. He is dead.”

There was a collective gasp in the collective student body before rocky-skinned Santo Vaccarro offered up, “Wait—who?”

“Liam didn’t have many friends,” Dani admitted. “That was something we all could have helped him out better with. It looks like Liam killed himself somehow with his fire powers, but Dr. Reyes-McCoy believes that there was foul play involved.”

Several students offered up an “I didn’t do it!” and sniggered, to which Dani rolled her eyes. “For those of you who care, that’s why you’re all on lockdown. No one leaves the school itself without a teacher. That means that the grounds are off-limits, so no one leaves the school. No one. At all. Capisce?”

There was a dull sense of muttering throughout the student body. Dani caught whiff of the words “murder” and “lame-ass Goth punk.”

“Figures,” Dani muttered to Rahne. “I get absolutely zero respect from kids who think they’ve seen everything just because a prostitute was banged outside their apartment window. Can you believe I left Asgard to come back to this?”

“How dare you mock this job, Dani?” asked Rahne, twitching like the dog she was inside. “We’ve got a murderer on the loose, and it’s going t’take the likes of me, you, Xi’an, and Amara to figure it out!”

The Rec Room

“This is freakin’ retarded!” complained Boyd Larraby, flopping down unceremoniously onto one of the recreation room’s worn couches. He was an attractive, superficially homosexual young man who went by the codename Air Force due to his control over air molecules.

“I mean, first they tell me I can’t get married, then I can’t get on my partner’s insurance, and now I can’t leave the school because the guy who told us we all suck went and burned himself to death… How lame is that?” he ranted.

Ami Huo, arguably the calmest New Mutant of the bunch, stepped in. “You know, maybe this is all of our faults? If we’d been more open to Liam, he wouldn’t have run off into the woods, and if he hadn’t done that, then he’d still be alive.” A strand of hair fell in front of one of her eyes, and Ami reacted thirty times faster than a normal human in order to flick it away, hence her codename—Velocity.

“Our faults?” Boyd interjected. “This is no more my fault than it is the man on the moon’s, but that doesn’t mean I can go outside these walls any time soon!”

“Well, y’all know we can’t change their minds,” said Tammy Lynne Baker, a.k.a. Bootylicious, the overweight Southern mutant and co-squad leader. “Ah do so think that Miz Moonstar is able t’handle the lockdown all by herself.”

“You on crack, bitch,” said Shaquanita Jenkins, fluffing her afro-styled hair. Her codename was Milkshake, given justly because the shaking of her butt and breasts became hypnotic to on-looking males. “No way she got any clue what goin’ on!”

“She’s just as clueless as the rest of us,” agreed Boyd, his hands behind his head as he studied the ceiling with mild curiosity. “Besides, some kid gets killed at Mutant School, what are you gonna do? You gonna say, ‘Oops, Liam killed himself because he didn’t have any friends’? Or are you gonna say, ‘Uh-oh! I bet Magneto told someone to do it’?”

“Good point, fo’ a cracka,” Milkshake agreed, shaking her head in approval.

Bootylicious rolled her eyes. “Ah’ll bite mah tongue,” she said. “But just ‘cuz we lead this squad t’gether, Milkshake, doesn’t mean Ah’ve got to think y’all are right…”

At that moment, the door to the rec room opened, and the room grew quiet. Blonde and heart-stopping Sophia Frost walked into the room with an attention-grabbing air about her. Her four “sisters”—really apparitions based on her multiple personalities—followed her, mirroring her every move. The rumor was that her psychic prowess was too much for Sophia to handle and she had to split up the workload in order to handle it.

Sophia was followed by Eduardo Franco, the Latino gang-banger who called himself Rock Hard. Tattoos ran down his arms and his face was marked with a goatee. Since his recent arrival at the school, Eduardo had set himself up as a ladies’ man—and someone not to mess around with. Velocity had heard stories about people who had messed with Eduardo due to his Hispanic blood. Apparently, those people had the word “wetback” forcibly removed from their vocabulary.

Bringing up the rear was Ahmed al-Rashid, codenamed Sirocco. The Muslim Saudi Arabian appeared to be trying to blend into the walls of the room because he wanted to remain unnoticed. Air Force had a hard time not thinking about or looking at Sirocco’s dark, tanned form when he entered the room. Just before the assembly had been called, Boyd had kissed Sirocco, and he wasn’t exactly sure what that meant for the two of them. Sirocco was still convinced that both he and Boyd were “abominations,” so there was at least one little roadblock in any sort of future relationship.

{Oh, good,} said Sophia into the New Mutants’ minds. {We’re all here. Now the real fun starts…}

“What do you mean by that, exactly?” asked Velocity, shivering from the feeling of another person’s thoughts in her mind.

{What I mean,} Sophia said mischievously, {is that I’ve been doing a psychic recon of the school, if you will, and I found something very interesting. I can’t tell who, unfortunately, but the truth is…one of the people in this room is responsible for the death of Backdraft…}

The Office of Danielle Moonstar

Dani ran her hands through her hair, upsetting her tightly bound braids. “This is getting to be a little too much for just us to handle, don’t you think?” she asked, sighing. Dani’s three best friends surrounded her in her office.

Rahne snarled. “Come on, Dani! Don’t you see what’s at stake here? You let this one go, how many more wee Magneto’s come around thinking they’re the next big thing?”

Amara Aquilla nodded. “Rahne is right, Dani. We cannot let this injustice go unpunished.” Amara’s arms were crossed over her body as she stood at an alert state of attention. As Magma, she had fought her share of enemies, and death was not something she was unfamiliar with. “The perpetrator must be caught and treated by the law. Otherwise, we lose all control over these students. It is like something I remember from Nova Roma. When a crime happened, the culprit would have to be caught or the people would lose respect for their leader.”

“Besides,” added Xi’an Coy Manh, the Vietnamese woman called Karma. “You know you couldn’t let yourself sleep at night if the guy who killed one of your students got away with it, now could you?” Xi’an’s words rang true. Dani was not one to let someone get away with murder. “So why don’t you think you can handle it?”

Dani stood up, eyeing each of her friends. “There are a lot of students here, and I don’t know how many of them even knew Liam, let alone had a problem with him. He kept to himself a lot. I just have a problem with figuring this out when I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I could have done to stop it…”

“Dani! Don’t ye dare blame this on yuirself!” exclaimed Rahne. “There’s nothing ye could’ve done to stop it!”

“He died on my watch, Rahne!” Dani said, raising her voice. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes. “He ran off into the woods when we were supposed to be together as a squad because I didn’t handle it right! And then, he didn’t come back! If I’d only stopped him…!” Dani broke into tears right then. It was unusual to see her crying over a student, but this was the first time anyone had died on her squad. This was a new experience for all of them, in a way.

“Can you use your powers to figure out what happened at the crime scene?” suggested Karma, a comforting hand on Dani’s shoulder.

“Scott suggested it before,” Dani said. “I don’t know if it would work. There would have to be some severe emotions running at the time. If it was a spur-of-the-moment thing or if Liam didn’t live long enough for some bona fide fear…we don’t have a chance.”

“But is there a chance that those emotions are left behind?” Amara asked, a hand now massaging her chin in thought. “If there’s even a chance, then it is an avenue we must pursue.”

Dani nodded, wiping away another tear. “You’re right,” she said, steeling her face against any new emotion that might play across it. Anything she felt before was replaced with raw determination. “If there’s only one thing we can do, we can at least try—and maybe then, we can bring the killer to light and to the law…”

Illusion

Air Force’s legs pumped under his body and his breathing increased as he jogged along the dirt trail that wound around Breakstone Lake. There were few things that one could keep up throughout life, but running was one of them. As Boyd ran through the woods, he stopped, seeing the silhouette of another boy there, too.

“Hey, who’s out there?” Boyd asked, walking off the trail toward the other boy.

Boyd was surprised to see Liam’s form staring back at him, eyes wide. “Get the hell away, faggot! Stay back!”

“The hell’s your problem?” Boyd seethed. “Bite me, asshole!”

“You’d like that, dick-sucker, wouldn’t you?” Liam asked, the air around him shimmering in heat. “Rot in hell.” Then he raised his hand and lifted the middle finger up in an offensive gesture.

Boyd lifted off the ground and rocketed toward Liam, pounding him against a tree. The fiery mutant struggled to fight back, launching an inferno from his palms. Before it could reach Boyd, the flames died.

“You can’t light a fire if the oxygen won’t feed it, retard,” he said, kicking Liam in the crotch. While the smaller boy cringed on the ground, Boyd scuffed his tennis shoe across Liam’s face, drawing blood. “You deserve to die, bigot. You might as well kill yourself.”

Then, while Boyd ran off into the distance, that was exactly what Liam did…

FLASH!

The rec room reappeared before the assembled mutants. They’d been joined during the intermission by Sage Alcazar, the bad luck-causing Jinx, and the mutant mathematical concept called Integer.

“That was amazing!” Sage exclaimed, her eyes wide. Everyone gave her an odd look before she could correct herself. “I mean, the power was amazing, Fusion! Not what you made it show, I mean…I…uh…let me take my foot out of my mouth?”

{That was just one possible scenario,} Sophia offered. {There are plenty of other possibilities of what could have happened besides an insult-throwing contest.}

“But that didn’t happen!” Boyd exclaimed from the couch. “You know that, Sophia! You talked to me telepathically while I was running!”

{And I left you until I came and got you and Sirocco because of the murder. We don’t have a timetable so we can’t figure out opportunity quite yet…but a burnt carcass, due to the nature of the temperature, has problems being identified with a T.O.D.} Sophia said, quickly adding for Sirocco’s sake, {That’s time of death, I mean. What I’m getting at, though, is that you could have had the opportunity. I’m not accusing you, but I’m looking at all the angles.}

“And, hon, since y’all came here, you’ve been a mighty big jerk,” Bootylicious added. “You could’a taken offense ta somethin’ he said real easy.”

“So now everyone hates me?” Boyd asked. “I’m just a normal guy, except I’m gay and pissed at the world that hates me. Your average, all-American, WASP—that’s me.”

“WASP?” Rock Hard interjected questioningly.

“He means he’s a White Anglo-Saxon Pain-in-the-ass!” Milkshake cracked.

“No, dammit!” Boyd said, holding his hands up in protest. “Sirocco can back me up! He was with me between when Sophia left and we found out about the murder!”

Sirocco’s face was cold. “I was not ‘with’ anyone, Air Force. You are a most frustrating and confusing individual and I do not know why you make this such a problem. Simply allow Fusion to read your mind to find if you are speaking the truth.”

Boyd’s jaw dropped. “What the hell, man? You were there! I fucking kissed you, asshole! Back me up! They want to hang me for a murder I didn’t commit!”

Sirocco’s face flushed from cold to hot. “That did not happen!” he exclaimed, but it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than anything else.

The girls looked back and forth in amusement. “This is better than Springer!” Milkshake whispered.

“Oh! So now you want to deny that ever happened? That you didn’t like it?” Boyd asked, his arms spread wide to the heavens.

“I did not like it!” Sirocco shouted, his eyebrows furrowed.

Boyd’s eyes widened in triumph. “Ha! So you admit it happened!”

“I—I did not do that! I…stop! You are confusing me!” Sirocco said, looking down. “You are very hard to understand…I cannot understand you, not the way I have been taught. My religion tells me that you are a disgrace to man—a man worthy of eradication! But my religion tells me that I, too, am a disgrace, and for that…”

“Right now,” Boyd said, “I actually don’t really know what to say…”

{Don’t worry, boys,} said Sophia. {I think the point is, you’re both each other’s alibis, and I can back you up until then for the time I spent in your heads.}

{That was just getting interesting!} protested Terra, but she didn’t press the point further.

Sage used the moment to snuggle in next to Rock Hard, who looked surprised. She knew what had happened, but she had to use her assets to keep herself afloat. If it meant getting cozy with Eduardo so that her pariah effect could take place, so be it.

Sophia turned to the squad leaders next. {Do either of you have any problem with me reading into what you’ve been doing in the past few hours? I promise to keep out of the juicy stuff. Besides, it’ll stop you from having a lover’s quarrel like those two…}

Bootylicious nodded. “Ah don’t have a problem with that,” she said simply.

Sophia turned to Milkshake. “Bitch! You stay outta my head!” Milkshake screeched. “I spent all day fightin’ Ricky and his punk-assed girlfriend!”

“It’s true,” Velocity admitted. “Miss Moonstar mentioned it earlier.”

Sophia accepted this and then blinked. Bootylicious felt a tingle in her head that disappeared almost instantly. {You’re clean,} Sophia said after a second. She moved over to Ami and gave the all-clear just seconds later.

“All right, so that leaves Trent and Eduardo, plus the other kids who aren’t on our squad, right, Sophia?” Velocity asked, twitching nervously at rapid speed.

Rock Hard sat up from where he had been on the couch, his hand down Sage’s pants. Sage grimaced, but it had been a necessary sacrifice. Rock Hard was now worthy of his codename, but Sage also knew that she’d stayed in close enough proximity for long enough that her butt was probably no longer on the line.

{Well, Eduardo?} asked Sophia, as the Latino mutant straightened up. {Let’s see what’s inside your black bug room…}

The Woods

Rahne’s fur was bristled up while, in her lupine form, she paced around the scene of the crime. The body had long since been removed, but she could remember Liam’s final position as clearly as if it were still there. “Let’s get this over with,” she growled.

Dani nodded. “Sorry. Mental preparation. If I keep telling myself I can’t do this, then I can’t…so that’s why I’m having issues.”

“I’m going to be anchoring you,” Xi’an said, placing a comforting hand on Dani’s shoulder. “Your head is safe in my hands. We’ll hold you to the here and now while you dig into the emotions of the past.”

“And you have Rahne and I as firepower if something goes wrong,” Amara added. “You are perfectly fine, Dani. I have faith.”

Dani knelt down in the spot Liam died and concentrated. There was a lot of fear there, for certain, but she knew that it would be a losing battle to pull Liam’s emotions out of the environment. She needed to feel something from the killer. Then Dani touched upon it. Anger. Brutality. Bloodthirstiness.

“Prepare yourselves,” she whispered in a trance-like voice, before illusion became reality…

Illusion

Liam relaxed against the tree stump, head in his hands. He hated a lot of the things other people did, but he hated his own actions more. Why did he have to go and tell all those people that they sucked? He might as well have told them to go screw themselves. They might have been his only chances at friends.

Hah! Liam’s other half laughed. Like those posers could be friends. He was much better off alone.

Alone…

Trudging through the trees, was Eduardo. He had disappeared just after the squad meeting, and no one had seen him afterward. Liam didn’t see Eduardo storming toward him until it was too late. “Wait, what are you—oh!” he shouted. Eduardo slammed his head against the tree bark.

“You know what I did to the last gringo who told me I suck, hombre?” Eduardo asked, his tobacco-ridden teeth just inches from Liam’s face. “I ripped the skin from his bones…”

“You know what I did to the last guy who thought he was tougher than the ‘lame-ass Goth punk’?” Liam asked in a hushed voice. Eduardo didn’t respond.

“This.”

All of a sudden, Liam’s arms lit aflame, causing Eduardo to back off just a few inches. “I burnt the skin from his bones.”

“Nice try, but you don’t have the huevos,” Eduardo grinned. “I’ve played with my share of punks by the border. They all got the same thing in common—plenty of lip, no balls to back it up.”

With that statement, Eduardo rushed Liam, smacking his rock-hard arm into the side of Liam’s head. Liam fell against a tree, struggling to shoot flames at Eduardo in the process. Unfazed, Eduardo grasped dirt and threw it at Liam’s eyes. Since his hands were covering his face, Liam felt both of his forearms splinter as Eduardo tackled him.

“You call this ‘burning the skin from my bones,’ eh, Emo? Quieres bailar?” He grabbed Liam’s torso and flung him to the ground, causing him to skid into a log. “I’ll tell you what, hombre… next time something sucks, vent your sucking on Air Force. And when you come back, I will tell everyone how you cried like a bitch when you fought the wetback, no?”

Liam said nothing, remaining on the ground. Eduardo grinned his yellow grin. “Grow some cajones, or kill yourself.” Then he left the scene. Everyone could figure the story out from there…

The illusion dissipated, and the kids in the rec room were as shocked as they had ever been. “I’ll fight my way out of here,” Eduardo said. His skin grew thick and hard at his words.

Sophia stood in front of him. {Not if I have anything to do with it, jackass,} she said, holding a single hand out in front of him.

“To turn a phrase,” grunted Rock Hard, “Usted y qué ejército?”

Suddenly, to Sophia’s left and right, her four “siblings” appeared. {That would be us,} they chorused, and Eduardo’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. He crumpled backwards onto the ground.

At that moment, the door to the rec room slammed open as Rahne, Dani, Xi’an, and Amara rushed in. “Where’s Eduardo?!” shouted Rahne. “Where’s the lad? I’ll kill him!”

“Don’t sweat it,” said Velocity. “He’s out. Thank the Fusion sisters.”

Dani put a hand to her forehead. “Thank the Spirits it’s over. If only I’d put two and two together—his background plus the fact that he disappeared after the meeting…maybe Liam would still be alive…”

Amara grabbed Dani by the wrist. “No. No more of that. What’s done is done. It is only what happens afterwards that matters…”

“You’re right,” sighed Dani. “The funeral…”

Two Days Later

“…and so we gather here to remember one we have lost,” said Dani, standing in front of the few assembled students. She had debated with herself and Xi’an about how best to handle the situation today, and had finally come to the realization that there was only one way to handle it—brutal honesty.

“We are here to remember the good and to laugh about the bad times and to figure out how to move on…but that’s not why any of you are here, is it?”

The New Mutants and few other students who had come to the memorial service sat there in silence. “You come out of guilt,” Dani continued. “You come out of the fact that you know that, just maybe, if you’d handled one moment better, Liam would be alive right now. That maybe, had you gotten to know him, Liam would have had a friend and a reason not to kill himself. This is where you start feeling worse…”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but the truth is, part of me wants to feel bad. Someone just died, and all we can do is sit here and talk about how little we knew him! Well, I had the job of going through his belongings since his parents wouldn’t take anything, and I got to know him yesterday!” Dani said, her voice rising. Her eyes began to water up and a single tear ran down her cheek.

“Liam O’Keefe didn’t have any friends, and he knew it. In fact, he may have invented himself a friend. Going through some of his journals, we think he was borderline schizophrenic. But at the same time, Liam was a poetic genius. In those same journals that he yelled at himself, he wrote amazing lines of meter that flowed into my soul when I read it,” Dani continued.

“We didn’t get to know him on earth, but Liam left behind a legacy so we could know him afterwards…There’s nothing else to do but to leave you with his words:

Tomorrow’s not the end,
The bottom of the trend,
But all trends start anew
And life must follow through.
So while all life must stop
And restart from the top,
So, too, must the day,
And sunlight fades to gray.
Now to my flock you tend,
But—
Tomorrow’s not the end.”

Dani wiped another tear from her eyes. “See you tomorrow, Liam…”

Epilogue

Sage sat there in her room, thinking about all that had transpired. She had screwed up, big time, and it was all because she’d lost her temper. That’s what happens to good mutants—they screw up and end up looking like bad mutants. They try to show up at mutant school and do the right thing, but they end up messing it up for everyone. That’s how Sage felt.

During the first five minutes she’d spent on the campus, Sage, essentially, killed Liam O’Keefe. It was an accident, sure, but that didn’t stop her from feeling guilty. She knew it was her pariah effect that had caused Liam’s death.

Sage had been late for her orientation. She rushed across the courtyard paying more attention to whether her clothes had bunched up unnecessarily than who she was walking into. Suddenly, she stumbled forward over another student, who fell backwards. His papers and books scattered across the ground.

“What the hell were you doing?” asked the boy, his black, dyed hair and eye shadow marking him as an outcast. He scrambled to gather his precious papers before the wind blew them away, flipping her off as he went. In that moment, Sage gave into temptation and used her power on purpose for the first time in her life. She gave Liam a very high dose of bad luck.

It was bad luck that he would end up saying the exact wrong thing in front of Eduardo. It was worse luck, however, when Integer and his mathematically inclined friend, Calculator, decided to train out in the woods that day.

“C’mon, Trent! If you don’t practice on something, you’ll never know how much math is going to knock them out and how much is going to kill them! Just wait for a rabbit or something, and we’ll try it out,” Calculator urged.

At that moment, as luck would have it, Liam was starting to walk back toward the school. He rustled the bushes, whispering, “Kill myself? I’ll show him cajones…”

“There! That’s gotta be a deer!” Calculator said excitedly. “Try it there!”

Integer focused his power and uploaded an insane amount of math into the oncoming figure’s brain. It wasn’t until too late that they realized it was a human. Liam’s already-frail mind was overwhelmed by the sudden intellectual influx he was receiving. He had always held his powers in check, like the door that holds a backdraft in check during a fire. With those barriers gone, however, the backdraft was free to come loose…

FWOOSH!

Liam’s body went up in flames to such a high temperature that even his semi-resistant skin couldn’t stand the heat. Integer and Calculator saw what was happening and watched on in horror, trying their best by scooping dirt atop Liam’s writhing body.

Then, slowly, Liam began to stop moving, stop screaming, stop breathing…and it wasn’t until then that the mathematic duo turned tail and ran, hoping that, somehow, they wouldn’t be caught.

It wasn’t until Liam was alone like he had been all his life that he could be at rest.

Then, the last ember went out.

The End

Author’s Note

I got to wrap up a murder mystery. That’s the cool part.

Yeah, mysteries are my favorite, even if I’m not terribly good at writing them. So when I saw that one of the bigger mysteries the mansion’s seen had still gone unsolved, I realized there was a problem. I had to know—who killed Backdraft?

That was when I decided to make up my own mind.

I guess in my head, I always saw Rock Hard as the culprit because he disappeared in issues #2-3. Then I started talking to others who had read the issues, and a friend said that he believed Integer was the killer due to the fact that he and Calculator had “other plans” than being X-Men. On top of that, though, I needed something to tie it all together, and that pariah effect started looking nicer and nicer by the minute.

Of course, I had plenty of other things to talk about, like Air Force and Sirocco, Velocity being the biggest suck-up at school, and Fusion being awesomely awesome without being wickedly wicked. So she just saves the day is all. No biggie.

But yeah, I’m rambling. I hope I did George’s character justice in this and I wanted to be sure to let everyone know that, well, this is probably not how or who he wanted to be the murderers, but that can’t be helped.

As long as you enjoyed it, that’s good enough for me.

Thanks for reading this far.

-Hunter Lambright