X-Mans 4: Before They Was X-Mans

by D D

Young men fighting for their community in 1978 are transformed by a mad scientist’s experiment, forcing them to survive his betrayal and reclaim their lives.

Comic Book

comedy

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35 scenes

X-Mans Before They Was X-Mans X-Mans: Before They Was X-Mans Everyone had gathered in the basement. Stormisha stood beside the open steel cabinet, holding the old photograph beneath the work light. Cyrus wore the temporary visor Monsta had built for him. Jeanetta sat with one hand over her stomach. Reen remained in the doorway, bruised, bandaged, and quieter than anybody expected. On the tape, a bass guitar thumped somewhere far away. Young men laughed. A woman told somebody to get his feet off her table. Then a younger version of Professor Z began to speak. "July fifteenth, 1978. First official meeting of the Kings of Tomorrow. If we ever become famous, this recording proves the whole thing was my idea." Another voice cut in. "Your idea? Man, that's my tape recorder." The present-day Z closed his eyes. The basement disappeared. * * * In 1978, Zachary Freeman had enough hair for three men and enough confidence for six. His rounded afro nearly brushed the ceiling of the tiny office above Club Jubilee. He wore dark glasses after sunset, a rust-colored shirt opened one button too far, and a gold chain he had purchased on credit. At twenty-six, Zachary had not yet discovered humility, paralysis, telepathy, or property taxes. Trick Magnus lounged across from him in burgundy slacks and a matching vest. He was tall, smooth-faced, and handsome enough to make women forgive him before learning what he had done. A bass guitar rested across his lap. "Kings of Tomorrow sound like a gospel group," Trick said. "We are an organization of exceptional Black minds." "We got a bass player, a mechanic, a boxer, and Leonard, who still owe me eleven dollars." Leonard raised his head from the couch. "This meeting ain't about finances." The other two men laughed. Curtis Bell was a broad-shouldered amateur boxer studying physical education. Isaiah Moon was a soft-spoken chemistry student who wrote poetry on grocery receipts. Together with Zachary and Trick, they appeared in the photograph that would remain locked away for nearly fifty years. The fifth chair belonged to a man none of them had met. Heavy footsteps climbed the stairs. A tall, lean Jamaican man entered carrying a damaged amplifier beneath one arm. Long dreadlocks hung past his shoulders, and a thick beard framed a calm face. Smoke followed him into the room. "Which one of you mash up dis poor machine?" Trick pointed at Zachary. Zachary pointed at Trick. The stranger set the amplifier on the desk, removed its rear panel, and studied the scorched wiring. A hand-rolled spliff rested behind his ear beside a carpenter's pencil. "Name's Omari," he said. "But everybody call me Rasta." "Can you fix it?" Trick asked. "Already fix it." Trick frowned. Rasta reached behind the amplifier and pressed a switch. Music filled the room, cleaner and louder than it had sounded downstairs. Zachary slowly removed his glasses. "How did you do that?" "While all you busy pointing finger, me replace di transistor." That was how Rasta joined the Kings of Tomorrow: by repairing their equipment, insulting all of them equally, and accepting payment in cash because he did not trust American banks. They were not heroes. They organized tutoring sessions, repaired appliances for elderly neighbors, broke up fights outside Club Jubilee, and escorted children home when local gangs became too bold. Zachary supplied the vision. Trick supplied charm and connections. Curtis supplied muscle. Isaiah understood chemicals. Leonard could talk his way past almost any locked door. Rasta built whatever the others imagined. For one summer, they believed intelligence and brotherhood might be enough to change their corner of the city. Then Dr. Benjamin Dover walked into the club. * * * Dr. Dover was a white man in his late fifties with silver hair, pale blue eyes, and the measured voice of someone accustomed to being believed. Newspapers called him a humanitarian geneticist. Universities competed for his lectures. Politicians photographed themselves shaking his hand. He was also a mutant. No one knew it yet. Dover watched Rasta repair a lighting board while Zachary explained their neighborhood program. He asked intelligent questions. He remembered every name. When Leonard described being rejected from an engineering internship, Dover appeared personally offended. "Men like you are excluded because mediocre people fear competition," he told them. "I intend to change that." He offered laboratory jobs, scholarships, equipment, and a permanent building for their programs. Within a month, the Kings of Tomorrow were working from Dover Institute, a converted municipal hospital with polished floors and locked rooms belowground. Zachary believed they had found a mentor. Trick believed they had found money. Rasta believed they had found trouble. "White man give away too much thing," Rasta said one night. "Either him guilty, dying, or planning something wicked." "You distrust every white person with a laboratory," Zachary replied. "How many you know?" "One." "Then me record still perfect." Dover's generosity produced results. Isaiah received access to chemical equipment. Curtis trained in a private gym. Leonard designed community housing proposals. Trick recorded music in an unused acoustics room. Rasta was given an engineering workshop filled with machines he had only seen in magazines. But opportunities outside the institute began disappearing. Leonard's city fellowship was withdrawn after an anonymous accusation of theft. Curtis was suspended from competition after a drug test he insisted had been altered. A record executive stopped returning Trick's calls after receiving a letter describing him as violent. Isaiah discovered Dover's name listed above his own on research Isaiah had performed alone. Whenever something went wrong, Dover was waiting with comfort and another reason for them to depend on him. Zachary did not see the pattern because he was in love. Claudette Avery taught history at a nearby high school. She had deep brown skin, intelligent eyes, and a laugh that made Zachary forget the point of his own stories. They danced at Club Jubilee every Friday. She tolerated his enormous afro occupying half the bed and had already begun circling houses in the newspaper. Dover treated her with immaculate courtesy. Claudette disliked him immediately. "That man looks at y'all like jars on a shelf," she told Zachary. Zachary kissed her forehead. "You teach teenagers. Suspicion is an occupational illness." Across town, Trick had begun seeing a woman named Misty Teek. Misty appeared at Club Jubilee in a silver dress and left with every man wondering whether she had looked directly at him. She was beautiful, funny, and impossible to remember precisely. Trick described her eyes as hazel. Zachary swore they were green. Curtis remembered them as dark brown. Rasta saw her reflection change in a window. "Dat woman face move when she face don't," he warned. Trick grinned. "That ganja got you seeing tomorrow." Misty became Trick's favorite mystery. She disappeared for days, returned with new hair and a different accent, and knew which Dover Institute doors were alarmed. Trick mistook secrecy for excitement. He did not know that beneath every borrowed face, Miss Teek had blue skin. * * * By autumn, Dover was ready. He invited the six men belowground after midnight and unveiled a circular chamber surrounded by copper rings. He called it the Ascension Engine. "Human evolution is inconsistent," he explained. "My own mutation allows me to stimulate dormant biological potential through touch. This machine will magnify that gift. Disease, weakness, even aging could become choices rather than sentences." Trick stared through the glass. "You telling me you can stop folks getting old?" "In theory." Rasta examined the control panel. Several circuits followed designs taken from his workshop. "You build dis with my work." "I refined your work." Zachary stepped between them. "What exactly are you asking us to do?" Dover smiled. "Help me prove the future does not have to exclude men like you." The chamber was supposed to scan them one at a time. Once all six entered, the doors locked. Gas spilled from the ceiling. Copper rings began rotating. Rasta struck the glass with a metal stool, but electricity threw him backward. Zachary saw Dover beyond the chamber, one hand resting on the controls. Misty stood beside him. Her face changed as Zachary watched. Brown skin became blue. Black curls flattened into red hair. Her yellow eyes filled with something that might have been shame. Trick pressed both palms against the glass. "Misty?" She could not look at him. Dover's voice entered through a speaker. "History will call this an equipment failure. I will call it evidence." "Evidence of what?" Zachary shouted. "That advancement cannot correct temperament. Give power to the undisciplined and they will destroy themselves." The Ascension Engine activated. Pain erased the room. Curtis grew first. Muscle expanded across his frame until bone cracked beneath it. Isaiah's body became translucent, veins glowing like chemical fire. Leonard split into flickering copies, each one screaming a fraction of the same scream. Trick rose from the floor as every bolt tore free from the chamber walls. Metal swarmed around him, responding to panic he could not control. Rasta's spine bowed. His lean body expanded until his shoulders struck both sides of the chamber. Blue spread across his skin. His hands enlarged, his beard thickened, and his dreadlocks whipped around him in the magnetic storm. Then Zachary heard a thought that was not his own. Please let me die. It belonged to Isaiah. Another voice followed. Then another. Curtis's terror. Leonard's fractured mind. Trick's rage. Rasta calculating the machine's failure faster than language could contain. Misty's guilt. Dover's satisfaction. Beyond them came thousands more. Nurses upstairs. Drivers on the avenue. A woman dreaming two blocks away. A child crying inside an apartment. Every mind arrived at once. Zachary clutched his head. Heat rolled from his skull. His afro began to smoke. "My hair!" Even while dying, Leonard stared at him. "Man, we got bigger problems!" The enormous afro ignited around the edges. Zachary slapped at it as clumps floated upward, carried by Trick's magnetic field through the heated chamber. In seconds, the proud crown that had survived rain, dancing, and two separate kitchen fires collapsed into smoking patches. Then the ceiling came down. A steel support beam struck Zachary across the back. His legs vanished from his awareness. He hit the floor but could no longer feel it. Misty moved. She changed into Dover, placed his copied hand against the biometric lock, and opened the chamber. Trick blasted through the door with a storm of metal. Dover escaped behind a reinforced wall while alarms consumed the institute. Rasta lifted the beam from Zachary. His new blue hands trembled. "Zachary. Move yuh foot." Zachary tried. Nothing happened. Across the chamber, Isaiah's light was fading. Leonard's copies blinked out one after another until only the original remained. Curtis forced himself upright, his misshapen body barely holding together. They had entered as six young men. They left as something the world did not yet have a name for. * * * Dover controlled the newspapers before sunrise. The institute announced that unauthorized employees had sabotaged experimental equipment. Police searched for Trick, Rasta, Curtis, Isaiah, and Leonard. Zachary remained hospitalized under Dover's supervision, unable to move his legs and unable to silence the thoughts surrounding him. Claudette came every day at first. She brought scarves for his burned scalp. She held his hand through the headaches. When doctors refused to explain why his injuries did not match their report, she threatened them until security arrived. Zachary loved her enough to avoid entering her mind. But thoughts did not require permission. One evening, Claudette helped him into a wheelchair. Her face remained gentle while fear moved beneath it. What if he can hear everything forever? Zachary looked away. I can't spend my whole life afraid to think. "Claudette." Her hand froze on his shoulder. "I heard you." The silence between them was worse than dishonesty. She tried. For three more weeks, she tried. But every pause became suspicious. Every private memory felt exposed. Dover arranged for a psychiatrist to tell her Zachary might eventually control minds rather than merely hear them. Claudette packed her belongings while Zachary watched from the chair Rasta had secretly built for him out of hospital parts, motorcycle wheels, and a stolen car stereo. "I still love you," she said. Zachary heard the rest without her speaking. But I cannot live like this. She left the engagement ring on the table. Zachary never chased her. He could have placed comfort inside her mind. The fact that he possessed that power was precisely why he refused to use it. Trick made a different choice about pain. Medical tests showed his cells had stopped aging. Wounds closed faster. His body remained fixed at twenty-eight while the calendar continued without him. Dover had described immortality as a gift. Trick understood it as a sentence. He watched his mother develop gray hair while his face remained unchanged. Strangers accused him of lying in old photographs. Every mirror reminded him that Dover had taken even death's natural timing away from him. Misty visited once. She entered his apartment wearing the face he knew, then allowed it to dissolve. Blue skin replaced brown. Yellow eyes watched him from beneath red hair. "I didn't know he planned to kill them," she said. Metal objects rose throughout the room. "But you knew he planned something." "Yes." "Did any part of you love me?" Misty's expression answered too slowly. Trick turned away before rage made the decision for him. When he looked again, she had become an elderly woman and disappeared into the street. He never learned whether she had spared him, betrayed him, or done both. * * * The surviving men formed a crew because survival left them no one else. Newspapers called them dangerous mutants. Neighborhood children called them the Tomorrow Men. Trick eventually began calling himself Magnetrick after bending a police barricade around officers who had tried to arrest Rasta. Rasta rejected every suggested name until a frightened reporter described him as a monster. He stared into the camera, adjusted the red, gold, and green beanie covering his dreadlocks, and answered, "Rasta Monsta, den. Spell it proper." Curtis became stronger but less stable each month. Isaiah required chemical treatments to keep his body solid. Leonard's duplicates began appearing without his control, each carrying away pieces of his memory. Zachary promised to save them. For eight years, he failed. In 1986, they discovered Dover had built a larger Ascension Engine beneath a decommissioned train terminal. He intended to activate it during a crowded music festival and expose thousands of predominantly Black residents. His private records revealed the truth. Dover had sabotaged their careers, stolen their work, falsified reports, and selected them because he believed the inevitable casualties would be ignored. His own mutation allowed him to force biological changes, but every use caused his body to decay. The machine was meant to transfer that damage into others and preserve him. They entered the terminal together one final time. Dover's guards opened fire. Magnetrick stripped their weapons apart in midair. Rasta tore through a concrete barrier while Isaiah melted security doors into glowing liquid. Leonard filled the station with copies, confusing Dover's sensors. Curtis held a collapsing passage open long enough for civilians above to escape. The Ascension Engine began charging anyway. Dover stood at its center, no longer hiding what he was. His skin shifted with borrowed tissue. Extra joints moved beneath his arms. Faces of previous victims appeared briefly across his chest, then sank back into him. "Look at you," Dover said. "Eight years, and you have accomplished exactly what I predicted. Violence. Instability. Dependence." Zachary entered his mind. He saw every sabotage. Every forged letter. Every controlled failure. Dover had never feared that the Kings of Tomorrow would fail. He had feared they would succeed without him. Zachary forced the truth into the minds of his friends. Magnetrick stopped fighting. Something colder replaced his anger. Dover activated the engine. Curtis threw himself into the central mechanism. The energy consumed him, but his transformed body jammed the rotating rings. Isaiah flooded the cooling system with his own unstable matter, knowing he could not pull himself back together. Leonard created hundreds of copies around the core. Each one seized a different cable. "Do it!" Leonard screamed through every mouth. Rasta ripped the primary conductor loose. The explosion swallowed the three men who had stood beside them in the photograph. When the light cleared, Curtis, Isaiah, and Leonard were gone. Dover crawled from the ruined chamber, rapidly healing by pulling life from the injured guards around him. Magnetrick dragged every loose piece of metal in the terminal into the air. Zachary felt his intention. "Trick, don't." "He killed them." "Then we expose him. He answers for all of it." Dover laughed. "To whom? The courts that funded me? The newspapers that printed my lies?" Magnetrick closed his fist. The broken chamber folded around Dover. Steel compressed from every direction. Dover attempted to alter his body, growing denser, then smaller, then armored. Magnetrick continued tightening the metal until nothing inside it moved. Zachary reached for his friend's mind. Magnetrick threw him out. The chamber collapsed into a solid iron coffin. Dr. Benjamin Dover died inside it. No hidden pulse remained. No second mind escaped. Rasta examined the wreckage and confirmed what Zachary already knew. Their mentor was dead. "You didn't have the right," Zachary said. Magnetrick looked exactly as he had eight years earlier. Zachary had lost his hair, the movement in his legs, the woman he loved, and three friends. Rasta had become something strangers fled from. Time had marked everyone except Trick. "He took my right to live natural," Magnetrick replied. "So I took his." That was the night the Kings of Tomorrow ended. Magnetrick left before dawn, carrying Dover's research and the first pieces of the metal helmet he would eventually wear. Zachary and Rasta buried what little remained of their friends. Newspapers blamed an underground mutant conflict for the destruction. History forgot Curtis, Isaiah, and Leonard. Zachary did not. * * * Weeks later, Zachary and Rasta sat inside a roadside bar, studying a newspaper report about unexplained violence several states away. A grainy photograph showed a compact man in a torn leather vest walking from the wreckage of a demolished tavern. Blood covered his shirt, yet the wounds beneath it appeared to be closing. Three metal claws extended from each hand. No name appeared beneath the image. Zachary touched the photograph and sensed a distant mind buried beneath pain, rage, and decades of broken memories. It was the mind of someone who had survived experiments of his own. Rasta studied Zachary's expression, then silently folded the newspaper and placed it in the storage compartment of the wheelchair. The photograph disappeared into darkness. On the old cassette, the tape reached its end and clicked off. Professor Z opened his eyes in the present-day basement. Across the room, Reen stood motionless beneath the doorway. For a moment, he looked exactly like the nameless man in the photograph.

X-Mans 4: Before They Was X-Mans

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