XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation

by Brad Magnarella

  He worked pin one into place again, then pin number two. Runnels of sweat circled the rims of his glasses, gathering at the bottoms of the lenses. As his hands worked, he thought about how the Army Information hack had led him here, in a strange way. Discovering the tap that night, hiding his computer equipment, promising himself that he would use his moratorium on hacking as a chance to embark on his maturation, to embrace it. To get out there.

  Oh, you’re out there all right.

  He set pin three as he reflected on his Bud Body regimen, his updated wardrobe, old self out, new self in, Gamma — none of which would have happened without the tap. And neither would the disastrous Dress-up Night, the same night he and Janis rediscovered whatever quality it was that still bound them.

  Pin four clicked into place.

  But to her, he knew he was just an interesting friend from her past. His transformation wasn’t complete, not yet. Friday’s confrontation with Grant and Britt had been a step, as was his attempt to negotiate with Jesse. His note to Janis also represented a step. But here he was, not the person he had envisioned, not Scott Summers. No, he was still Stiletto, his pulse racing in terror and exhilaration over this, his latest stealth campaign.

  He set the final pin and twisted the tension wrench. The bolt didn’t move. He’d turned the wrench the wrong way. When he tried to recover and go back, his grip slipped. All of the pins fell out.

  No, damn it! No! No! No!

  The timer raced toward four minutes.

  He snuck a glance at the fence above the culvert, knowing he’d blown it, that his time was more than up. He imagined the front door closing in front of Janis.

  With the weight of the house bearing down on him, Scott cut his gaze back to the keyhole. He blinked the sting of sweat from his eyes. He reinserted the tension wrench, hesitated, and then the pick.

  31

  Janis closed the door behind her and followed the ghost-like image of Mrs. Leonard through the dim front hall. The air inside the house smelled almost pleasant, like cakes of makeup. But within paces, it became apparent that the powdery fragrance concealed a cruder understench of cigarettes and dampness.

  A living room opened to their right. A faded, floral-patterned couch and two chairs sat over a dull white carpet. Thick beige curtains covered the windows. Something told Janis that the room had never rollicked with party sounds, not while the Leonards lived here. To her left, a staircase climbed steeply into darkness. Mrs. Leonard led them back to a kitchen, Janis wincing as the soles of her sneakers, still damp from the grass, began squeaking over the black and white tiles. Only then did it occur to her that if Mrs. Leonard was mute, she was probably deaf as well.

  “Excuse me,” Janis called, testing the idea.

  Mrs. Leonard didn’t turn.

  When Janis lifted her gaze, she stiffened. Beyond the round kitchen table stood a sliding glass door, and beyond that lay the deck, the same place Mr. Leonard had spent summer nights watching her house. From her vantage, the backyard where she and Margaret had grown up playing hide-and-seek and “colonial times,” where Margaret still sunbathed sometimes, looked dangerously exposed.

  In a few more paces, they would be able to see down into the Leonards’ backyard as well.

  Janis recovered herself and edged ahead of Mrs. Leonard to the far side of the table. She dropped her books and pulled a chair for her host, all the time shifting her body to block the view through the glass door.

  “Rest your back.” Janis enunciated carefully. “I’ll get you something to write on.”

  She pulled up a wooden chair beside Mrs. Leonard. Her fingers shook as she opened one of her notebooks and drew out a sheet of college-ruled paper and a blue pen. When Mrs. Leonard had taken them, Janis peeked behind. In front of the shed, his bowed head nearly touching the lock, stood Scott.

  Janis turned back to where Mrs. Leonard’s hand traced thin scrawls on the paper. Good, she writes slowly. Janis kept her torso rigid, fighting the urge to twist around again, to watch Scott to safety.

  She leaned toward Mrs. Leonard instead and noticed a fragrance about the woman. It was the smell of the house — fine and powdery on the surface but musty underneath — a smell redolent of illness and sorrow and being shut in. It was the smell of someone who didn’t go outside, not even for her own newspaper. Janis shifted her gaze to the bagged paper. A smear of condensation trailed behind it. At the place opposite Mrs. Leonard, Janis noticed a tall black coffee mug.

  Or maybe someone prevents her from going outside.

  And now Janis became certain that this woman was as in the dark as anyone. Whatever Mr. Leonard kept hidden under his shed, whatever his past crimes, whatever designs he had on Margaret, his wife knew nothing about them.

  Mrs. Leonard pushed the piece of paper in front of her: Your cat comes into our yard sometimes, but she hasn’t lately. I’m sorry.

  “So I guess you already know what she looks like?” Janis said.

  Mrs. Leonard took the paper back, nodding, and wrote something else, something a little shorter.

  I’ve seen her through the window. She’s pretty.

  “Oh, do you like cats?”

  Mrs. Leonard bent over the paper again.

  By her mental clock, Janis guessed it had been about four minutes. Scott had said he would bail if he didn’t have the lock picked within three. She peeked behind her. The top of his head was still stooped toward the door. Her toes began curling inside her white Keds, right foot, left foot, as if that could speed his progress. She turned back to the table just as Mrs. Leonard finished.

  Yes, but I can’t have one.

  “Why not? Cats are really easy to care for, if that’s, um, your concern. They’re very independent.”

  Janis labored to speak slowly, to stretch out the seconds. She’d never been one for small talk, had never seen the point, but now that it was vital she string sentences together, her mind was coming up painfully short.

  Mrs. Leonard shook her head and wrote out a fourth line.

  My husband.

  The word shot through Janis like a bolt, but she composed her face as she raised it back to Mrs. Leonard’s. “Oh, is he allergic?” Janis pointed to her own nose. “Do cats make him sneeze?”

  But Janis knew the answer. She could read it in Mrs. Leonard’s conflicted eyes. Her husband had already decided that she wasn’t to have a cat, no matter how badly she wanted one, no matter how isolated she felt. And maybe that was the point — to keep her isolated, to keep her dependent on him. Janis had heard about such relationships from Margaret.

  As if to confirm this, Mrs. Leonard shook her head again and began writing something else. And in that moment, Janis found that she was glad to be imparting a little company to this lonely woman.

  Mrs. Leonard pushed the paper back in front of her.

  He’s here.

  Janis thrust herself up. The coffee mug tottered on the tabletop. She hadn’t heard the rumble of the garage door, but it wasn’t the door to the garage that was opening. It was the front door.

  Footsteps landed in the hallway.

  Janis spun to where Scott’s glasses were just fading into the darkness of the shed, the door closing behind him. And then she looked down at Mrs. Leonard. The deaf woman stared back at her, her face taut.

  Wait a minute. How could she have heard? Unless —

  “In here!” Mrs. Leonard called clearly.

  It took another second for the full horror to dawn on Janis: Mrs. Leonard had been killing time, too.

  * * *

  Scott snapped on his flashlight and swung it around the shed, the stress of the lock-picking exercise still gripping his neck. Janis had expressed doubts about the things she perceived in her astral state, but the inside of the shed was how she’d described it — to the letter: shelves, old woodcutting implements, gloves. The space felt as claustrophobic as she’d described it, too. He ran his beam along the solid frame, then down to the pile of kindling.

  Clamping the end of
the camping flashlight between his teeth, Scott stooped and began moving the kindling to the shelves.

  The wounds on his palms stung as he worked, but Scott couldn’t stop to brush away the flecks of bark. Outside, his race had been against Mrs. Leonard returning inside the house and seeing him. Now, safely inside the shed, his race was against Mr. Leonard returning home in the next thirty minutes, give or take. He considered donning the gloves, but they looked stiff with age and would probably make his hands hurt worse. Plus, who knew what lived inside them?

  At last, Scott pried the plywood board up with his fingers and shook away the final layer of kindling. A few roaches scrambled away. He set the board against the door, took his flashlight from his mouth, and shone it down.

  “I’ll be damned…” he muttered, kneeling.

  The metal hatch was almost the size of a manhole cover. It was solid with a thick hinge on one side and a crescent-shaped depression on the other for grasping. But even using both hands, Scott found he couldn’t budge it. A twelve-hundred-pound holding force, he guessed. At least. Embedded in the cement beside the hatch sat a basic keypad. Scott smiled around his labored breaths. That more than proved it: Janis’s abilities were the real deal. He couldn’t wait to tell her.

  But now it was time to establish his own credentials.

  He closed his eyes and focused on the hatch. He guessed there was a magnet mounted in the frame and an armature plate around the hatch itself, the two bound by an electromagnetic force. He just needed to locate the source.

  He reached with the part of himself that hungered for distance and control, for power. His consciousness began twining in on itself, more tightly, more fiercely.

  In the next moment, DC current stormed around him. He was in! Scott pushed against the stinging current, feeling his way toward whatever spoke to the relay. Two lines plunged underground, one leading to a battery backup, he guessed, the other to some sort of central command. But there had to be something more local, something associated with the keypad.

  And there it was: a small circuit board.

  From far away, Scott felt his fingers resting over the blocks on the keypad. His hacking instinct urged him to probe for the correct sequence of data, the code. But how long would that take? No, better to concentrate on the relay between keypad and hatch, to short it.

  Scott pulled his energy in. As always, it was a struggle, as if the energy didn’t want to be harnessed, straining against him like a herd of cats. But at last, Scott contained it. He focused on the tiny relay that directed current to the solenoid — the generator of the magnetic field. A red point appeared in his mind’s eye and then grew, changing color, becoming hotter.

  It’s not the concentration of energy so much as its release.

  The thought came spontaneously, and with it, Scott understood what had happened the last time, with the tap. The strain to hold the energy in one place had overwhelmed his mind, rendering him unconscious. Free from his control, the energy had exploded outward in a mini–Big Bang.

  The trick, then, was to build the energy up and release it consciously.

  The orb in his mind’s eye swelled to orange. His head went swimmy. Just a little bit longer… The orb verged on white. Before his awareness could waver away, Scott let go.

  He staggered from the flash and the sensation of being blown from the system. He had been kneeling at the hatch’s edge, but coming to, he found himself slumped to one side, the flashlight fallen from his grasp. Its beam shone across his shoes. Standing, he seized the hatch with both hands and pulled. It swung open. Scott fell onto his backside, rattling the shelves around him.

  Where the hatch door had been, rebar rungs descended into darkness. Scott got to his feet and shone his light down. The cement cylinder ended in a room, maybe fifteen feet below.

  He lowered one leg inside the cylinder and then the other. He hooked his fingers around the rim, then the top rung. As he climbed down, his breaths echoed off the smooth wall in front of him. With his next step, it felt as though his foot had broken into open space. He moved his leg back in a circle to be sure. Cool air stirred past him. Scott was too far down now to see the keypad above, too far down to notice that the bottom-right key had begun to pulse red.

  He stepped from the ladder and cast his beam around.

  * * *

  “I said, what are you doing here?”

  Janis’s voice had become trapped inside her constricting chest. She looked at Mrs. Leonard, whose face remained tense, then back to Mr. Leonard, who stood at the entrance to the front hall. He had come in just seconds before, a black bag hanging from the shoulder of his crumpled gray shirt, his long brow still collapsing into a bed of creases over those awful glasses.

  “My cat.” It came out in the wrong key, like when you accidentally hit a minor note in a major chord. “My cat’s missing.”

  Mr. Leonard looked to his wife. “When did she come?”

  “Right after you left. She was just about to knock on the door.”

  His gaze fell back on Janis. “Who called this morning?”

  “What do you mean?” She tried to appear confused, but she was no actress. Her eyes felt too large, and she couldn’t stop blinking.

  “Who called me this morning?”

  Janis’s gut shrank beneath his raised voice. She edged back from the table.

  “I-I don’t understand…”

  “Don’t con me!” He charged into the kitchen, aiming his finger across the table at her like a weapon. “Don’t you dare con me! Someone wanted me out of the house. The schools don’t call me — we have that worked out. I parked one street over, waited, and came back. And now you’re here. Who put you up to this?”

  Janis’s thoughts had been colliding into one another, but now they found common direction.

  “I was up at the bus stop. I saw your car leave. And that’s what made me think to come over and… and ask your wife if she’d seen our cat. I swear I didn’t call you.”

  It was as close to the truth as she could possibly come. Maybe that’s why her face felt more natural around the sounds her mouth made. She watched Mr. Leonard watching her. He wasn’t looking down and to one side, like he used to do when he subbed, wasn’t hiding behind his newspaper. Beyond his lenses, the whites of his eyes appeared fierce and jaundiced.

  “Did anyone see you come?”

  “See me?” Fresh alarms clanged in Janis’s head. Yes! Yes! Say yes!

  She opened her mouth, but Mrs. Leonard spoke first: “I didn’t see anyone.”

  Mr. Leonard looked back at Janis.

  “I told my sister I’d be asking some of the neighbors about Tiger, so she probably knows…”

  Did his eye just tic at the mention of Margaret?

  “And you say you came from the bus stop?” he asked.

  Janis nodded, not knowing whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to be admitting. He turned and paced off into the front room. He’s looking out the window. He’s checking to see if anyone else is at the stop. When Mr. Leonard returned, he appeared less harried. He set his bag on the floor.

  “Sit down,” he told her.

  “I don’t want to miss my bus.”

  “If you miss it, we can take you,” Mrs. Leonard said, resting a hand on her arm.

  This coming from a woman who just faked being a mute. Janis felt like a trapped mouse. Her gaze skittered between Mrs. Leonard, who blocked escape to her left, and Mr. Leonard, who stood ahead of her to the right.

  “I-I really have to go.”

  She jerked around to the sliding glass door and saw with relief that it was like the door at their house, the one between the kitchen and back patio. It had a slider lock. Tall means locked, short means unlocked, she used to recite as a little girl. The Leonards’ lock stood in the tall position. Janis jammed it down and yanked the handle.

  The door opened an inch, then banged to a stop.

  At the same instant Janis saw the broom handle in the door track, Mrs. Leonard was around
her.

  “Get off!” Janis screamed.

  Mrs. Leonard pinned Janis’s arms to her sides with one arm and clapped a hand over her mouth with the other. She was not infirm. Her back was fine. The muscles that restrained Janis felt like steel cords. Janis wriggled and shoved against her, but Mrs. Leonard hardly budged.

  Beyond the glass door, she could see the light on in her own kitchen, where her parents would be eating breakfast, her father reading the newspaper. When she kicked the door, it only shuddered. She tried to scream through her sealed mouth. “Mmmfff!”

  Mr. Leonard moved in front of her, holding his hands out.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” he said.

  His voice was calm, but his eyes jittered behind his lenses. Janis leaped up and got a heel into Mr. Leonard’s lean gut. With a low grunt, he stumbled backward. When Janis went to stomp her captor’s foot, Mrs. Leonard anticipated her. She stepped back and tightened her grip.

  “Janis,” she said into her ear. “We just want to talk to you.”

  Mr. Leonard recovered and drew something from his pocket. It was about the size and shape of an electric razor. When he cocked his wrist, the object hummed to life. Lights on either side of it blinked red.

  “I don’t want to have to use this,” he said, recovering his breath.

  Oh, god, what is that thing?

  She tried to squint away as the blinking device drew nearer. It smelled like a hairdryer beginning to overheat. Then something sizzled, not a sound but a sensation — inside her head. When Janis tried to scream again, saliva spilled against Mrs. Leonard’s fingers and turned cold against her own lips. Gray lights began to flash around the periphery of her vision.

  Don’t pass out, she pleaded with herself. Whatever you do, please don’t pass out.

  She stopped struggling.

  Mr. Leonard stared at her another moment, then withdrew the device and flicked his wrist. The smell and sensation faded with the red lights, and Janis blinked until her vision cleared.

  “That’s better.” Mr. Leonard was just returning the device to his pocket and opening his mouth to say something more when the phone in the hallway rang. Janis’s gaze followed his, faint hope flickering inside her. Maybe someone saw me walk into the house. Maybe they told my parents. But Janis had never heard a ring like this before: half ring, full ring, half ring.