The Ultimate X-Men Read Online Free PDF

his other regrets was that there wasn’t a subway stop nearer to his job than West Fourth Street; it was a long walk in this heat. Too bad he hadn’t been born lucky instead of smart; luck would at least have arranged things so he didn’t have to go in to work on a Sunday afternoon in August. But the presentation to the client hadn’t gone at all well, and Barry had promised an entire new ad strategy by Monday. And that meant overtime. A weekend full of it.
    Scott sighed, welcoming the coolness in the lobby as he went through the revolving doors at 375 Hudson. August in New York wasn’t for sissies. The guard knew him and waved
    Id
    in k wonitim lift
    him through, proof that he was putting in too many hours at the job. And for what? Athletic shoes. An account as ordinary as the rest of his life . . .
    Everything about him was ordinary, Scott Summers thought to himself.
    Horror lent her strength. He’s shuffling us farther and farther away—into realities where mutants don’t exist at all—I can 7 let him blot us out this way — David! David, listen to me! We aren’t the enemy. We don’t zuant to hurt you . . .
    . . net profits down every quarter for the last six years, eaten alive by Korea and Japan; what did I expect?” Bobby Drake sighed.
    Not this. He scanned the “Help Wanted” columns of the Sunday New York Times again, although he knew he wouldn’t find anything there. The available jobs for obsolete middle-management former programmers were few to nonexistent, but nobody’d thought that IBM would make the cuts it had.
    Now he was out in the cold. Despite the August heat, Bobby Drake shivered. He wasn’t even thirty yet—his life couldn’t be over.
    Could it?
    Deliberately closing her mind to Ferris’s perception of the world, Phoenix turned her thoughts away from the present, sinking deeper into Ferris’s psyche. Into the only place that help could come from. Into the past.
    * * *
    m ULTIHM X-HEI!
    His name was Davey Ferris, and he was eight years old. Starbuck had been his companion and best friend for as long as Davey Ferris could remember, which was, why, it was years and years. Starbuck was no particular kind of dog—a Heinz, as Davey’s father liked to say, because he contained fifty-seven varieties of dog within his rangy frame—but that didn I matter to Davey.
    And then one day Starbuck died. Hit by a car.
    “Daddy, where’s Starbuck gone?”
    “Fm afraid he’s dead, son,” Davey’s father told him. But in hundreds and hundreds of universes right next door Davey’s dog was still alive . . .
    “But he doesn’t have to be, Daddy!”Davey Ferris had tried, for the first time, to explain.
    “Hush, son. No one can bring back the dead. ”
    “But, Daddy, he isn’t all dead. Not everywhere. ”
    Davey Ferris wasn’t quite sure why his father said Starbuck was dead, when Davey could see him, alive, in the universe next door. He supposed that Starbuck had tracked mud in or broken something, and as he was a good boy, he thought he wouldn’t bring Starbuck back until they’d gotten over being mad. But he was only eight, and eventually he forgot. . .
    His father’s fear had bridled David’s use of his mutant power more effectively than any prohibition could, but he hadn’t been able to bear to give it up entirely. Instead he’d only used it for little things.
    Until it was too late.
    In his mind ... the car. . . Black Team 51 ? Another government agency or private corporation that desires to enslave the supernormal for their own purposes? Weariness and anger threatened to break her concentration: when would governments and
    in A WONDERFUL LIFE
    would-be governments stop treating paranormals as mindless puppets to be exploited for some nationalistic agenda? All we want is our own lives . . .
    But David Ferris hadn’t been given the luxury of autonomy.
    The Moebius Lance—energy weapon ? Drug-delivery system ? Whatever it is, David didn’t mean to fight us at all — now, if I can