X-Treme X-Men #30

Publisher
Marvel
Year
2003
Month
10
LastChanged
2/3/2024 10:38:55 AM
God Loves, Man Kills II

Pale Rider
Summary

  Note: this is God Loves, Man Kills 2: Part 6 and Conclusion.

  Sam flies Ororo and Deathstrike into town, but then all mutants in town are suddenly in pain, except Lucas, who sees it's a lethal attack on their central nervous systems. Luckily, the newcomers hadn't been completely transformed yet, and he tells the Garzas their kids will survive. Sam drops Deathstrike and then drops to the ground with Ororo.

  Stryker prays among the corpses, wishing things were different but knowing some of the good must be sacrificed if humanity is to prevail.

  Lucas tells the Garzas that everyone's been infected with nanites, and something must have disrupted the core nexus (Paul, see last iss.). He wasn't affected because in the future he was inoculated against such infections.

  Stryker starts to walk away, when Kitty revives and grabs him.

  Sam goes to retrieve Logan's body, just as he revives. He let Deathstrike stab him in the heart to kick his healing factor into overdrive, to get rid of the nanite infection. Sam points out that's crazy but then takes him to find Kitty.

  Kitty holds a gun on Stryker and quotes Revelation to him, about the pale rider. He says X-Men don't kill; she says she's a Chicago girl.

  Deathstrike has revived and throws a bomb; Sam drops Logan into Lucas's arms and grabs it, staying invulnerable in his blast field till it explodes. He gets blown back into Logan's arms; Lucas goes to finish Deathstrike, while Logan enters the church to find Kitty.

  The lights and computers come back on: Paul has revived. Kitty tries to explain to him that all humans are children of God, whether mutant or not; Stryker says he's just a cybernetic sentient whose systems are crashing. He's trying to transfer his programming to the outside world, but Mt. Haven was built to be isolated. But Deathstrike is cybernetic.

  Lucas finds Deathstrike trapped under wreckage; he's not sure if she's helping Stryker or still under Paul's control, so he just starts shooting, to destroy her circuitry before Paul can use her as a conduit.

  "Paul" explains the real Paul was a prisoner, and the computer would talk to him and saw light in him. He was ill, and Pankow had the computer perform experiments on him; when it decided to help him, Pankow tried to shut it down, so it merged itself with Paul as he died and got religion. Now it realizes its dream has gone wrong. Kitty tells Stryker to get everyone clear; she's going to phase through the computer core, and then use the town's geothermal taps to bury the whole valley. Stryker thought she would want Paul to kill all non-mutants, but Kitty reminds him again that she's human, too. Stryker decides to let Paul merge with him and be buried there, so they can teach each other and find redemption together. He has Kitty lock him into a bio-vault, while the complex collapses all around. Logan's worried, but Kitty pops up, phasing through the ground.

  At the Belles of Hell in Chicago, the bar Kitty works at, the team relaxes over beers and hears news reports of Stryker's disappearance and a volcanic eruption in the Cascades. They decide Stryker was just misguided, and Kitty tells Ororo her life is here now. She wants to publicly be a mutant, and she's thinking of running for alderman. They agree to try to make a world worth all the sacrifice.

  Rant: with X-Men I:423-424, these issues demonstrate the generally anti-Christian bias of many of the X-writers (cf. Wolverine II:177-178, Soldier X 4-6, Domino ‘03 LS). No other religion is similarly disparaged in these books. Some of this is just contempt for authority, in line with other stock villains: the military, government, businessmen, parents, etc. But it should be remembered that the concepts of love for one's neighbors, individual freedom and equality, and liberty of conscience came into European culture through Christianity.